Directed by Luca Guadagnino | Written by Nora Garrett | 138 min | ▲▲▲
It’s rare to see a big Hollywood feature tackle a culture war subject — whether it’s Diversity, Equality and Inclusion or #MeToo — but After the Hunt touches on both. It’s a bit messy, and bit of a melodrama, which is not surprising coming from Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name, Challengers), a filmmaker who likes to luxuriate in his subjects, both a sensualist and a maximalist. The film may have been more effective with a sharper, leaner script, but it’s clear Guadagnino wants to ask questions, not answer them, and take his time doing it.
After the Hunt gives Julia Roberts the best role she’s had in yonks. She’s Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale pursuing tenure. She’s a big smoker and drinker, brittle and private, married to Frederik (Michael Stuhbarg), a therapist, and they live in a moody, gothic flat with very high ceilings. Also pursuing tenure in the same department is Hank (Andrew Garfield), with whom Alma is friendly. The apple of Alma’s eye is a student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) — she’s Black, brilliant, queer, and the child of wealthy donors to the university. After a party at Alma and Frederick’s place, Maggie and Hank leave together. The following day, Maggie tells Alma that Hank assaulted her.
Will Alma feel a loyalty to Hank, with whom she has history, or will she step up to help protect her favourite student? Hank claims Maggie’s lying, of course, providing some calculated motivation for it, but really there’s never much doubt. So then what happened between them isn’t what this movie is concerned with, more the aftereffects in the cauldron of higher education.
Alma and her colleagues (including a somewhat underserved character played by Chloë Sevigny) are bright, sophisticated, and extremely well-educated, but what’s clear here is how blind they are to their miseries, their privilege, their delusions of grandeur, and their insular world where they get to make huge salaries and criticize the younger generation from the ivory towers of academe without giving students much room for making their own mistakes or even offer credit when they get things right. Does the film manage an even assessment of the youthful naivete of a few sheltered 21-year-olds? It sure does. But what Guadagnino and his colleagues are doing is taking some sharp jabs at the so-called liberal elite, and since so many critics fall into the cohort, maybe that’s why so few of them are enjoying this movie.
And that’s not to say it’s perfect, it’s quite a distance from that. At my screening the picture was dark and grainy, with shots occasionally out of focus. The sloppiness around the way it’s photographed is echoed over an egregious running time that could’ve easily lost 20 minutes to half an hour, and a coda that doesn’t do much but suggest that cancel culture has a best before date, which isn’t helpful. There’s an inciting incident in the first 20 minutes — Maggie finds something hidden in Alma’s bathroom — that feels wildly implausible, information that could’ve been conveyed in about a half-dozen other, more likely ways, like a Google search. The atonal creepiness of the Reznor and Ross soundtrack is occasionally appropriate, but too often distracting from what’s happening on screen.
Finally, there’s the choice of Windsor Light, the Woody Allen font for the titles, white type against black. This is a direct, obvious choice, which in a movie that enjoys its provocations, feels a little needless. Allen was very comfortable in this world of wealthy American intellectuals, but his movies ridiculed their neuroses, too. They were also very funny. There aren’t a lot of laughs in this movie, which actually suffers in comparison to the best of Woody Allen.
But what works here works well. The performances are all solid, and the portrait of Alma and Frederik’s marriage feels particularly vivid. It’s a relationship that’s survived her trauma, self-loathing and addictions, and his asshole behaviour, and is by the end strangely hopeful. What stays with you as you walk out of the cinema is how Alma’s meanness is so smoothly wrought, like stone steps worn shiny by the tread of a thousand feet. She’s maybe the most complex, inscrutable character in Roberts’ career and the picture is worth seeing just for that.
