My long-held line on Luca Guadagnino is that he’s good enough that I wish he was better. Though any enamor of late is pretty drib-drab, and ’nino doing Ryan Murphy’s Oleanna proves a most ineffectual pathway back to Light Likability.
Julia Roberts’s ice queen phase — the sheer brooding contempt she projects toward all and sundry in many of her recent projects — is fascinating to me given how ubiquitous that thousand-watt smile and accompanying million-dollar laugh was during my youth. Now both grin and guffaw tend to be deployed singularly, with malice — here in an early bar scene with fellow Yale Uni prof Andrew Garfield (ever the beta, straining for alpha) as they tipsily commiserate about “kids these days” just before a torrent of #MeToo Scheiße splatters their respective ivory towers.
The pair’s brief moment of catty pleasure presages the j’accusatory hurricane to follow, an oh-so-of-the-moment maelstrom the film heavily suggests is conjured by Ayo Edebiri’s social-striving African-American nepo-baby protégé with a perhaps unwitting assist from Lío Mehiel’s gender-non-conforming activist beau. And I thought One Battle After Another had issues with black women and nonbinary/trans folk. Hold our beer, sayeth Luca and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, whose career as an actress includes a short film titled Bitch, You Thirsty (2021), a much more suitable moniker for this frat-ulent, cancel-culture-redressing folderol.
Only Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny seem to have gotten the surely-this-can’t-be-serious memo. Watching them entertain themselves in the margins (Stuhlbarg doing peacocking food-prep in his and Roberts’s spectacular kitchen; Sevigny dropping jaw over someone jukeboxing, gasp!, Morrissey in a college roadhouse) helps counter the otherwise overriding sense that After the Hunt — the title of which I can’t help working into the demonic Burt Bacharach theme from a certain Vittorio De Sica-Peter Sellers barrel-scraper — is a deep-space dispatch from Planet Dingleberry.