Director Luca Guadagnino redeems himself after a run of mid films, not least QUEER and CHALLENGERS, with the adult, nuanced, tricksy and provocatively brilliant AFTER THE HUNT. It’s based on a script by Nora Garrett and deals in shades of grey and ambiguity. It reminded me of the best of those ethical dilemma dramas that Woody Allen made in the mid to late 80s, not least because Guadagnino pays homage to Woody with the style of his credits. It also reminded me of the iconic ALL ABOUT EVE in its depiction of a rather spiky marriage and the disruptive interloping of a young rival.
It is far from a perfect film. I felt that Andrew Garfield's performance went from depicting an obnoxious character to just being obnoxious. Whenever he's faced with a choice he always tends to go too big. I also didn't feel the epilogue was necessary or additive. So why have I given the film five stars? Because I have spent much of the hours following the screening discussing its choices and themes and debating what was actually happening. I love it when films provoke debate and withhold easy answers. I also think that Nora Garrett has pulled off a rare feat in so evenly balancing the accusations that Gen Z and Gen X have of each other.
The movie is essentially a four-hander battle of the wits between two generations. In the older cohort we have Julia Roberts’ Alma, a Yale University Philosophy Professor who specialises in teaching virtue ethics. Alma is cool and calm, perhaps too well-put together and unflappable. Her sense of style is assured and unique and easily aped. Early on we discover that she has some kind of secret from her youth, and that she withholds a lot from her husband. We feel that it must be traumatic and yet she seems to regard its artefacts with fondness. The deepest level of the film is concerned with uncovering her attitude to this event.
In contemporary life, Alma seems to attract acolytes, and has a dangerously unboundaried relationship with her star students and her younger colleague Hank. She somehow holds this all in a fragile equilibrium that the movie will shake. The fascinating and unresolved side-issue that we get no clear answers on is whether Alma has a problem with drug addiction or if she really is just treating excruciating pain. Did the drugs cause the ulcers or the other way around? What we do know is that Alma is a career woman and deeply ambitious. She wants tenure. She has battled her way through the misogynistic world of academia and wants her just desserts.
This may well be the role of Julia Roberts’ life, and certainly it’s her greatest role and performance of her later career. She is on screen for almost every scene and she carries the film. Alma is enigmatic, infuriating, arrogant, makes terrible choices, and yet I found her to be real and sympathetic.
Alma is married to a psychiatrist called Frederick, played by the always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg. It's a small role, even a cameo, but as in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, in some ways it's Stuhlbarg's character that carries the emotional heart of the film. Frederick can be theatrical and immature and petulant. But he truly loves his wife and understands something profound about her childhood trauma that she cannot see. He also understands something profound about her relationships with Hank and Maggie. He is flawed but wise.
In the younger cohort we have adjunct professor Hank who is also battling for tenure. His students love him, he flirts with everyone, and he is an obnoxiously large character, played to the limits of largeness by Andrew Garfield. I suspect some of this is a necessary choice. His career will be ruined by a graduate student, Maggie, who accuses him of sexual assault right after he accuses her of plagiarism. We will not know if he did it, but we have to see his largeness, his physical presence, his lack of self-control, to feel that he might have done. It's a slippery role. His first reaction is hurt and entitled and arrogant. That does not mean he did it, of course.
And finally, in real opposition to Alma, we have The Bear's Ayo Edibiri as Maggie, her young PHD student, acolyte, and mentee. She is a young black female philosopher at Yale, so one might imagine she is already on the back foot. But screenwriter Nora Garrett complicates Maggie by making her incredibly wealthy: the daughter of major donors. Does Alma suspect she is a plagiarist? Is she? Yes she does dress like Alma. Did she steal her mother's Bulgari ring to wear as a pendant, copying Alma? Is her accusation of trauma replicative of Alma's? Is the accusation an attempt to discredit Hank? Is she dating a trans man for the optics? It's a good performance from Edibiri, every now and then hinting at satisfaction at getting a certain reaction from Alma, but I felt that of the four actors she was the weakest. Perhaps because this is by far the largest and more complex dramatic role she has been given.
The wonder of this script and film is that both Maggie and Alma are right. Maggie is right to say that Alma has let her down, both in her reaction to the assault but more broadly. Maggie is right that first-wave feminists did not adequately support the struggle of women of colour, and too often tried to get what they could within the existing patriarchal structure rather than challenging it. Alma's life has been one of not compromising her ambition by upsetting the apple-cart. Maggie wants to destroy it. But Alma is also right in how she skewers Maggie's generation for its virtue-signalling progressive illiberalism: its need for the safety of a lukewarm bath when university in general, and a philosophy class in particular, should be all about debating uncomfortable subjects.
Like I said, this is far from a perfect film. But it is an ambitious and provocative film. I love that it centres a middle-aged complex woman and is willing to confront and interrogate shifting inter-generational attitudes to difficult issues. The running time is long but I was not bored for a minute. This is grown-up cinema at its best.
AFTER THE HUNT has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London. It opens in the USA on October 10th.
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