“After the Hunt” re-litigates the #MeToo/Cancel Culture wars and muddies the waters about what has and is being achieved by this latest rift along the gender and generation gaps.
It’s only mildly provocative and not at all satisfying. But it’s mysterious and Ivy League immersive enough to hold our interest until it settles into an anti-climax.
The film lacks the usual slap in the face shock that has become director Luca Guadagnino’s trademark. Whatever sharp storytelling with an edgy sexual subtext the director of “Call Me By Your Name” and “Bones and All” achieved with “Challengers” and “Queer,” you’d have to say this academic melodrama represents a step backwards.
Perhaps the subject matter is too distinctly American or just too slippery for him to get hold of. Or perhaps taking on a script by a young actress turned first-time screenwriter wasn’t the smartest decision of his career.
Julia Roberts stars as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor in “Hunt,” a smart, brittle but self-confident achiever who doesn’t suffer fools or thin-skinned Gen Z students gladly.
In her 50s, she’s not the careless smarty-pants her departmental bestie, rival for a tenure position and flirtatious “work husband” — perhaps “with benefits” — Hank (Andrew Garfield) is. But if he’s the sort of younger male associate professor who banters with and flirts with students at a faculty-students cocktail party, Alma’s the arrogant empress who figures she can throw such parties without repercussions.
Because inviting a couple of “favorites” among her students isn’t smart. Whatever they bring to the conversation, adoration of her and deference to Alma when she snippily cuts their assertions and arguments to ribbons is their chief function.
Her canny psychotherapist husband (Guadagnino favorite Michael Stuhlbarg) sees through Alma. He might have a sense of whatever “secret” she’s keeping from her past. He certainly suspects she’s had or is having an affair with Hank. But she’s keeping these bouts of gut pain from him.
That “secret” is something student Maggie (Ayo Ediberi of “Bottoms” and TV’s “The Bear”) stumbles into while poking around her hostess’s bathroom. But the risks of that evening’s mixer blow up in everybody’s faces when drunken Hank walks Maggie home.
Shaken Maggie skips class the next day, but confides to Alma what happened. Or her version of it. The calculating, tenure-track academic isn’t exactly a feminist shoulder to cry on.
“What are you saying happened?”
We know that she knows that no young woman is likely to make something like this up. Maggie’s “given your history” hint suggesting that they’re gender allies may get Alma’s back up, but she dodges Hanks frantic calls, is noncommital when he attempts to “explain” himself and goes straight to her dean as word races across campus. Alma is by the book.
Maggie may be a “mediocre” student. Maybe she plagiarized her dissertation-in-progress. She’s “rich and entitled.” That doesn’t invalidate what happened to her. Or it shouldn’t. But Alma maintains her spot sitting on the fence.
With little mystery about what happened, “After the Hunt” becomes a movie about what happens “after.” But there’s not much to that. So it becomes a delivery platform for protesting monologues and cutting digs at “kids these days.”
As in “These kids have had everything handed to them their entire lives,” blurted by Alma’s friend, a school psychotherapist (Chloë Sevigny). Hank’s plea that Maggie’s “word” will undermine “a lifetime of hard work and good deeds” may resonate with some sexual assault equivocaters.
Academia, the most direct intergenerational contact between The Old Guard (Boomers) and the “entitled” young (Gen Z) is “a minefield these days,” especially at a school that holds open public debates over “The Future of Jihadism is Female.” But that “minefield” line, like “the insane times we live in” and “this shallow cultural moment” are among the scripts’ many statements of the obvious.
“I can be cold sometimes” is practically Julia Roberts’ brand, in or out of character.
There are assertions meant to generate a knowing smirk to whichever generation’s character is delivering the hard truth to the other.
“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable, Maggie.”
“Am I not OWED” the benefit of the doubt in such an accusation, Maggie demands?
Roberts is only somewhat convincing as a starchy academic and Garfield is more at home playing the tipsy cad struggling to justify his advances than either is in the many off-the-cuff debates among academics and between teacher-and-student over Foucault, Hannah Arendt and millenia of great thinkers. The names and lines feel read, not acted.
Ediberi lacks the fire and outrage we’d expect from someone in her situation, even a “mediocre rich” student.
The standout performance comes from Stuhlbarg, who gets across Frederick’s “We’re too old and too married to lie about anything so blatantly” wit and lets us see how comically passive aggressive a shrink can be when he’s reminded he’s the junior partner in this relationship with smart, brilliant beauty.
But as our screenwriter (Nora Garrett also plays Billie in the cast) paints her story into a corner and actors and her director can’t get her out of it, “After the Hunt” stumbles towards a finale that doesn’t satisfy, resolve anything or even make sense.
As current as these issues and this debate remains, a story meant to pass judgement after the dust settles just comes off as mediocre, murky, both-sidesing virtue signalling from a writer out of her depth.
Rating: R, “sexual content” and profanity
Cast: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Ediberi, Chloë Sevigny and Michael Stuhlbarg.
Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, scripted by Nora Garrett. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 2:18
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