Over the past couple of decades Julia Roberts has convincingly transitioned from a great movie star to a fine actress. Recognising this, Luca Guadagnino has rewarded her with the sort of role usually reserved for the Kidmans, Blanchetts and Winslets of this world, a juicy lead part in a hot button drama. Roberts elevates the shoddy material and her magnetism ensures we're always at least partially engaged, but the film around her is an overblown mess.
After the Hunt is set in what increasingly appears to be the coalface of America's ongoing culture wars: academia. Yale, to be precise, and given its negative portrayal of that institution and the sort of people who staff and attend it, you have to wonder why the university isn't suing for defamation. Guadagnino even opens his film with a title card that reads "It happened at Yale," despite Nora Garrett's script being a work of fiction.
There's a compelling film to be made about the generation gap between the old school liberal Boomers and Gen-Xers who staff American higher education institutions and the leftist and conservative students who run up their parents' credit card bills to study at such places. But After the Hunt isn't really interested in such a dynamic, beyond a few cheap shots at "woke" kids and their fear of "trigger warnings" and the like. Instead it's a he-said-she-said drama that could just as well have been set in a saw mill for all it has to say about modern American academia.
The "he said" half is represented by Andrew Garfield's Hank, an obnoxious professor who likes to flirt with his students and struggles to keep his hands off his female colleagues. The "she said" comes when student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Hank of assault after walking him home from a party at which he had a little too much to drink.
Stuck in the middle is Roberts' Alma, a philosophy professor who like all professors in such movies, is about to make tenure and doesn't need anything getting in the way of her progress. Alma is the first person to whom Maggie reveals her assault, but Maggie leaves disappointed in Alma's failure to immediately show support. Hank also approaches Alma in the hope that she will stand by him, and is similarly upset when she refuses to do so.
A more interesting version of this narrative might centre on Alma deciding whether to stand with her student or her colleague, but the decision is largely made for her early on when Hank is fired from his position. With Hank blaming Alma and storming off, she's put in the position where she can at least pretend to take Maggie's side.
Rather than mining the obvious dramatic potential of Alma making a moral choice, After the Hunt flounders around in search of a central hook. There's a subplot regarding a newspaper clipping held dearly by Alma, which is stolen early on by Maggie. The details of that clipping are teased throughout, but they ultimately don't really add anything of substance to the narrative. Another subplot sees Alma suffering from intense stomach pains, going so far as to forge a prescription that could jeopardise her chances of tenure.
That After the Hunt is more interested in Alma's physical pain than her psychological torment speaks volumes about its superficial approach to the material. It's a movie of loud and unsubtle provocations. Guadagnino borrows Woody Allen's signature white on black credits in what plays like a sick joke at that cancelled (in the Anglo Saxon world at least) filmmaker's expense. The sound of a ticking clock is laid over several montages, but it's never clear what exactly it's counting down. There are irritatingly staged scenes, like how Alma's husband (Michael Stuhlbarg, who appears to be morphing into Robin Williams in both appearance and inflection) keeps barging in and out of the kitchen as she tries to have a discussion with Maggie. A scene in which Alma takes down a student for applying identity politics to philosophy plays like a poor cousin of a similar moment in Todd Field's superior Tár.
After the Hunt's biggest misstep is how it wants the audience to make our own minds up when it comes to its he-said-she-said conflict. That's a fine ambition, but it does so in a way that won't change anyone's mind as it's built around exploiting ingrained prejudices that each viewer will bring to the film. The characters of Hank and Maggie are stereotypes designed to appeal to the left and right's ideas about such people. Hank is the sort of boorish toxic male that will satisfy the prejudices of the left while Maggie is a right winger's nightmare, a black lesbian in a relationship with a trans partner. Garfield struggles to make Hank real while Edibiri, a talented comic performer, is miscast in a very serious role and struggles to make Maggie seem sincere in her accusations. After the Hunt is structured in a way that makes it simultaneously seem like Hank is guilty while Maggie is fabricating her claims. It wants to play to those in both trenches of the culture war, but its fence-sitting approach leaves it with an ass full of splinters.
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edibiri, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Stuhlbarg
