Monthly Archives: October 2025

  • After the Hunt

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Luca Guadagnino (2025)

    ‘It happened at Yale’, says the screen at the start, although it didn’t really – After the Hunt is a fiction concocted by the scenarist, Nora Garrett.  The setting is the Yale philosophy department, and that choice of discipline doesn’t bode well.  Philosophy epitomises exalted intellect and ivory towers:  it’s the go-to subject if you want to portray academics as (a) very brainy and (b) clueless in the real world – in other words, obviously.  Not herself an academic, Nora Garrett also assumes that, because her main characters are a professor, an assistant professor and a supposedly brilliant research student, they must always be super-articulate and use impressive words that assert their learning, even during heated arguments.  When the assistant professor is fired because the research student alleges that he sexually assaulted her, he turns on the professor who he feels has betrayed him.  (As well as colleagues, this pair have been lovers – from the professor’s point of view, an extra-marital affair.)  He yells that he thought he and the professor had ‘a common fealty’.  True, he also goes on to brand her a ‘fucking coward’ but only at the end of the same breath in which he has quoted Shakespeare – ‘Let innocence make false accusation blush, and tyranny tremble at patience’.

    The professor is Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), the assistant professor is Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and the postgrad highflyer is Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri).  Hank’s guilt in the matter that generates most of the plot, isn’t taken as read just because he’s a white male in a position of some authority, and Maggie a much younger woman of colour.  After the Hunt is, rather, in the did-he-didn’t-he tradition of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2008), in which prejudices surrounding, and consequences of, the pivotal event, are dramatically more important than the facts of what happened (or didn’t happen).  Doubt, set in a 1960s Catholic school and church community, emerged at a time when alleged cases of historical child abuse by Catholic priests were becoming a major public controversy.  Most of the action in Luca Guadagnino’s drama takes place in 2019, two years after the birth of #MeToo, which helped bring to light sexual misconduct in various kinds of workplace.  Showing at the London Film Festival just a few days before its general release in Britain, After the Hunt seems like an interesting idea.  Yet the film is a stinker.

    Alma and her psychotherapist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) host a soirée for her faculty colleagues and students – Maggie and Hank are among the guests.  He’s verbally provocative and handsy, especially towards Maggie.  She, in the bathroom and in search of a toilet roll, discovers an envelope concealed inside a cupboard, looks through the envelope’s contents and pockets a newspaper clipping.  Despite the palpable tensions between them throughout the party, Maggie agrees to Hank’s escorting her home.  She’s not in class next day but turns up at the Imhoffs’ that evening to announce that the previous night Hank invited himself into her apartment, where he raped her.  When Alma puts this to Hank, he vigorously denies the allegation, claiming Maggie invented it because he’d accused her of plagiarism in her thesis (whose subject is virtue ethics).  Neither Hank nor Maggie finds Alma sufficiently supportive of their positions.  When Alma reports what Maggie has claimed to the faculty dean (David Leiber), Hank immediately loses his job.  Maggie goes public with her allegations in the Yale student newspaper.

    As for that newspaper story in the bathroom cabinet:  Maggie translates it (from German) to discover that Alma, as a teenager (in Sweden), accused a family friend of rape, but later withdrew the accusation.  Maggie claims this is why Alma has been so tentative in supporting Maggie’s claims against Hank.  The rift between the professor and her star student climaxes in an outdoor, public showdown, in which Alma accuses materially privileged Maggie of manifold insincerity.  According to Alma, Maggie is not only a plagiarist (of Alma’s own research) but also pretends to have things in common with Alma by aping the latter’s dress; if that’s not enough, Maggie is engaging in a purely ‘performative’ relationship with Alex (Lío Mehiel), her non-binary partner.  In return, Maggie slaps Alma’s face.  Licking her wounds in her second home, a wharfside apartment, Alma finds Hank in bed there:  their affair is over, but he held on to the apartment keys.  They talk a bit, then kiss; when Hank tries to step things up into sex, Alma kicks him out.

    Next day, Alma is confronted on campus by a group of student demonstrators, led by Alex.  Alma has already done a fair amount of stomach-clutching and throwing up.  She now collapses and is rushed to hospital for treatment on a perforated stomach ulcer (time-honoured symbol of a guilty secret gnawing away inside someone, handier than cancer because it’s easier to recover from if treated promptly).  In her hospital bed, she tells Frederik the truth about her own sexual assault as a teenager – that she initiated the relationship with her father’s friend and accused him of rape when he ended the relationship.  The man in question committed suicide.  Therapist Frederik, who knows strikingly little about his wife’s traumatic history, points out that the man was nevertheless guilty of statutory rape.  Also seemingly unaware of Alma’s fling with Hank, Frederik tells his wife he loves her.

    That’s not all.  In a bizarre subplot, Alma, who’s friendly with Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny), the campus psychiatrist (there appears to be just the one), nicks a prescription form and forges Kim’s signature so that she (Alma) can get hold of medication she needs.  Until this comes to light, Alma was on the verge of getting tenure; her misconduct puts that on hold, it seems indefinitely.  After Alma’s stay in hospital, the action leaps forward five years.  Alma and Maggie meet for a drink, the first social contact they’ve had since the 2019 happenings.  They’ve both Moved On.  Maggie didn’t get her PhD and she split with Alex but she’s now happily engaged, to a woman.  Alma can beat that:  she published an article about her teenage rape and is now faculty dean!  Maggie says she doesn’t believe Alma is happy.  Alma says she doesn’t care what Maggie thinks.  Maggie exits.  Alma pays the drinks bill and prepares to leave.  You wonder why they bothered with this reunion at all, except to get the film over the line.  Off screen, the voice of Luca Guadagnino calls ‘Cut!’

    Giving himself the last word, Guadagnino may be saying he doesn’t care either:  the ‘Cut!’ is a roguish meta touch that also sounds like the director admitting he’s had enough of the garbage he’s served up.  Guadagnino has been notably prolific in recent years.  He made his first feature in 1999; his biggest success to date, Call Me by Your Name, released in 2017, was his fifth feature.  Since then, he’s made six more (one a documentary) and a seventh (starring Andrew Garfield) is currently in production.  I’ve never been a great fan of Guadagnino’s work but After the Hunt is so much worse than what’s gone before that you wonder if he’s currently doing too much to be able to concentrate fully on the project in hand.

    How Yale works, according to him and Nora Garrett, is full of surprises.  A few examples:

    • Hank isn’t suspended but instantly dismissed, even though it’s a one-person’s-word-against-another case, with no other evidence available to the authorities;
    • Said authorities don’t apparently involve the police, even though Maggie’s allegations of rape are a matter of public record – not just in her newspaper interview but also thanks to the noisy dispute between Alma and Hank that can’t fail to be heard by a class of students;
    • The dean calls an urgent faculty meeting to discuss the Maggie situation – no suggestion there’ve been any prior meetings about it.  At the end, the dean asks Alma to stay behind as if she were a primary school pupil, this also within earshot of all the other staff present.

    When her tenure is paused, Alma says she always knew ‘the rotten side’ of her would be her undoing, before she achieved her academic ambitions.  She muses about this as if her professional downfall is caused by a kind of mystical inevitability rather than a concrete reason:  what did she expect forging a colleague’s signature on a medical prescription?  Call-me-old-fashioned but I was amazed that in 2019 some of Alma’s other students didn’t report her for abusive language in a seminar:  for her every mention of a famous philosophical name – Adorno, Arendt (Nora Garrett clearly going through the alphabet) – Alma directs at least a couple of angry ‘fuckings’ at one or more of the students in the seminar.  (This is almost a Garrett trademark – same idea as Hank’s ‘fucking coward’ after the quote from The Winter’s Tale:  a facile, phony way of making things savagely ‘real’.)

    It’s important to the story that what happened between Hank and Maggie after the party isn’t cut and dried, but the film is much more evasive than that.  By giving Alma her grim backstory, After the Hunt dodges the issue of how someone in her professional position, if she hadn’t had skin in the game, might have dealt with the situation created by Maggie’s allegations.  Because Maggie is, in various ways, exposed as a fraud, the film feels able virtually to ignore the question of whether she actually believes what she claims about Hank.  Didn’t Guadagnino realise that Nora Garrett’s screenplay was merely playing with cultural controversies, or didn’t it bother him?

    Despite mainly negative press for the film since it premiered at Venice a few weeks ago, plenty of reviews have praised Julia Roberts for ‘a career-defining performance’, and so on.  Not for the first time, a deservedly popular star is lauded for being cast against type – or, in this case, simply miscast.  Roberts gamely tries to give the impression that the florid sentences she speaks come naturally to her character; she does this, when Alma isn’t shouting, by drawling her lines and draining them of vocal colour.  With the help of the make-up team, she is physically transformed to look washed out – that is, to look not like Julia Roberts:  here too, her portrait of Alma is no more than self-effacement.  No actor alive could have made a silk purse out of the sow’s ear of Nora Garrett’s script but someone like Tilda Swinton, with whom Guadagnino has worked several times, would have suggested in her natural presence and the kind of intelligence she can project, a person of intellectual authority.  Julia Roberts doesn’t have authority of any kind in this role, which undermines the drama of Alma’s increasing loss of control.  Andrew Garfield doesn’t compensate.  Now in his early forties, Garfield remains a stubbornly boyish figure, a quality that dilutes the age and power difference between Maggie and Hank, and which makes him callow from the start.  Spouting Garrett’s purple prose, Garfield’s Hank comes across like a showoff student himself.  Ayo Edebiri treats her lines with too much respect:  she seems to be thinking how she should deliver them as she speaks.

    After the Hunt opens with a loud, ominous tick-tock, repeated a couple more times during the film.  The ticking so draws attention to itself that I thought at first it must mean something – a reminder maybe that, as #MeToo was gathering momentum, so too was the related Time’s Up initiative?  On reflection, I doubt this time-bomb effect is anything but that – an effect.  It’s upstaged anyway by other sonic features.  At the opening party, the ambient noise of chattering guests off screen so competes with the voices of the characters on camera, that I thought people in the Royal Festival Hall auditorium were carrying on a conversation.  Later, Frederik plays classical music deafeningly loud to make a point to Alma, but she’s lucky compared with the film’s audience, which must put up with for much longer Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ intrusively dissonant score.  The people involved in After the Hunt surely hoped that, with its star names and juicy scenario, they were making an awards contender, but the film, as well as being critically panned, is faring poorly at the box office.  The only superlative it merits is most annoying soundtrack of the year.

    13 October 2025

     

  • Jay Kelly

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noah Baumbach (2025)

    The title character in Noah Baumbach’s latest is a hugely successful movie star suffering a late-midlife crisis.  He’s played by George Clooney, now in his sixty-fifth year.  Early reactions to Jay Kelly, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is now showing at the London equivalent, have been lukewarm.  Baumbach, Clooney and the other smart people involved in the picture would have known that inviting sympathy for an exceptionally fortunate protagonist might not prove universally popular, and that plenty of people would speculate how much Clooney ‘is’ the man he’s pretending to be.  The movie they’ve made asks for trouble in both departments.  The decision to ask for trouble – which seems mystifying – is one of the more interesting things about Jay Kelly, which is sometimes entertaining but mostly frustrating and bland.

    Jay, who currently lives alone except for his house staff, has had two failed marriages.  Neither ex-wife appears in the film, but Jay’s two daughters do, although he’s virtually estranged from the elder daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), who tried acting but now runs a children’s day centre.  Eighteen-year-old Daisy (Grace Edwards) is about to travel in Europe before starting university.  An early scene between her and Jay suggests she’s fond of her father while finding him and his luxury lifestyle preposterous.  He proposes they spend a fortnight in Europe together, before Jay starts his next picture, but Daisy wants to be with friends her own age.  Jay got his start in cinema thanks to British director Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), whose stock has fallen in Hollywood but with whom Jay’s still friendly – though not friendly enough to lend his name to a film project that Schneider, desperately hoping to revive his career, needs financing.  It’s Schneider’s sudden death and the immediate aftermath to his funeral that sharpen Jay’s feelings of regret and precarity.  At the funeral, he bumps into Timothy (Billy Crudup):  best friends when both were aspiring actors, they’ve not been in touch for decades.  In a restaurant-bar, they talk and drink and Timothy, a child therapist now, reveals that he hates Jay for (as Timothy sees it) stealing his acting future.  He was up for a role in the Peter Schneider picture that launched Jay, who came along to the audition supposedly just to give his friend moral support.  In the event, Jay also read for the role and got it.  Their meeting at Schneider’s funeral culminates in angry words in the bar – Timothy has inside information (he and Jessica are Facebook friends) that Jay’s a lousy father – and a punch-up outside.  Timothy is left with a broken nose, Jay with a black eye and accusations ringing in his ears.

    He flies to Europe a day or so later, with his manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), and publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), both of them anxious to know how Jay got his shiner.  Since he’s not quite as bankable a star as once he was, they’re also exasperated – Ron particularly – by Jay’s second thoughts about doing the movie he’s due to start shooting.  The official publicity line is that Jay will visit Paris as a Dior ambassador before heading to Tuscany to pick up a lifetime achievement award at a film festival there:  Ron fixes this despite Jay’s earlier refusal of the festival’s invitation, though he’ll now have to share the spotlight with another award recipient and client of Ron’s, Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson).  Jay’s real motive in heading for Europe is to keep tabs on, and accidentally-on-purpose meet up with, Daisy, who’s on her way to a jazz festival in Paris – until she isn’t.  Jay has another member of his entourage tracking the credit card transactions of one of Daisy’s companions.  When he finds out Daisy and co are getting a train out of Paris, Jay instructs his team to buy tickets for the same train, unaccustomed as this Hollywood A-lister is to public transport.  His starstruck fellow passengers are thrilled to see him; Daisy, whom Jay finds in another carriage with her new, French boyfriend (Théo Augier Bonaventure), less so, especially when she discovers how her father has been monitoring her itinerary.  She angrily walks out of the carriage and except for a brief farewell sequence and a subsequent flashback to her and Jessica’s childhood, the film.

    Plenty happens en route to and in Italy.  To cut a long story short … Ron and Liz solve the black eye mystery when they learn Timothy is threatening to sue Jay for breaking his nose.  The train passengers include a pair of cross-country cyclists, one German (Lars Eidinger), the other Dutch (Ferdi Stomfeel).  When the German steals the handbag of an elderly English woman (Janine Duvitski) and jumps off the train, Jay hares after him, eventually wrestles the man to the ground and retrieves the handbag; the Dutchman explains that his companion is a decent chap on medication for some kind of mental illness.  The handbag-owner and her travelling companions – whom Jay has already invited to be his guests at the film festival tribute – are even more in awe of him, now they know he’s a true hero.  Ron arranges for Jay’s father (Stacy Keach) to fly from his home in Maine to Tuscany, never mind that Kelly père and fils have never hit it off.  Ron’s also able to report that the damages suit has disappeared, Jay’s lawyers having unearthed an old drugs charge against Timothy.  Mr Kelly senior doesn’t stay the course at the festival and returns to Maine.  Ron has lunch with Ben Alcock, who takes that opportunity to fire him.  Dismayed by Jay’s lack of interest in anyone but himself and anxious to get back to his own loving wife (Greta Gerwig) and their needy, tennis-player daughter (Sadie Sandler), Ron announces he no longer wants to work for Jay.  Ron does, though, agree to accompany him to the tribute ceremony, which is also the finale to Baumbach’s film.

    Like Jay Kelly, George Clooney hails from Kentucky.  Beyond that and screen celebrity, there’s not much obvious biographical common ground between them.  After a short marriage to Talia Balsam, Clooney had plenty of high-profile romances, but he didn’t tie the knot a second time until 2014, when he married the human rights lawyer, Amal Alamuddin; they’re still together.  The couple’s twin girl and boy, Clooney’s only children, were born in 2017:  he’s hardly had time to be the bad father that Jay is.  Unlike Jay, he has a famously positive relationship with his own father Nick, the former TV news journalist and anchorman.  Those eager to link the film’s narrative and George Clooney’s life story will probably find significance in the latter’s middle name of Timothy, but no one seems to have suggested that Clooney shafted a friend or fellow actor to get his big career break.  Yet plenty of the LFF audience were audibly keen to spot further connections.  When Jay is asked if he’s ever considered running for political office, an amused, almost excited ripple ran through the Royal Festival Hall:  aha, here’s something we know George Clooney has often been asked!  Setting much of Jay Kelly’s action in Italy, where the Clooneys are bringing up their children, may have a similar tantalising effect.  The film’s playing up to audience expectations in this way reaches a disastrous climax at the Tuscany ceremony.  In his theatre seat next to Ron, Jay watches, on a screen above the stage, a montage of scenes from his best-known movies.  Baumbach could surely, with the help of CGI, have concocted invented images of his leading man for the montage.  Instead, he shows us clips of some of George Clooney’s most famous screen appearances.  Although Jay’s memories of his daughters as children are also mixed in (this is the last of several sequences in which sixtysomething Jay ruefully observes moments from his past), this Clooneyfication just about kills Jay Kelly as cinema with a life of its own.

    A quote from Sylvia Plath’s journals – ‘It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself.  It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all’ – appears on the screen at the start.  The epigraph suggests the film means serious existential business, but this hardly materialises.  Jay does also share with Clooney a genial, nice-guy persona.  Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, who worked with him on the screenplay (and also plays Jay’s personal make-up artist), do little to suggest that maintaining his public image either denatures Jay or makes him a fraud.  They soft-pedal even on the portrait of him as exploitative and egocentric.  A film shoot is taking place under Jay Kelly‘s opening titles – the last day of shooting for Jay’s most recent movie – and, while the star is demanding, he seems genuinely popular with the crew.  He’s an imperfect father, a less than faithful friend, and, in relation to his entourage, an ever-pampered child; but Jay’s adoring fans on the train journey have no reason to be disillusioned.  He not only catches a thief but even expresses sympathy for the thief’s mental health issues.

    What existential angst there is seems almost decorative.  The Italian settings take Jay Kelly not only closer to George Clooney’s (main) home but also into culturally pretentious territory – Fellini, even Dante …  The story’s main theme – the self-questioning of a big name in cinema – and, in particular, a nocturnal sequence on a lonely road, call to mind 8½.  (The fairground flavour of Nicholas Britell’s score in the closing scene and into the end credits also has echoes of Nino Rota’s great music for the climax to Fellini’s film.)  In the road sequence, Jay chases the taxi that’s taking his father back to the airport.  He realises his pursuit of the car is hopeless, but he keeps on running.  Another vehicle, containing Ben Alcock and his retinue, pulls up beside Jay who, after a brief conversation with Alcock, wanders into an actual selva oscura.  There, he imagines a conversation with Jessica, in which he tries to persuade her to come to the tribute ceremony.  He succeeds only in triggering a flashback that explains why his elder daughter so resents him.

    Although there are some nice details, this script isn’t one of Noah Baumbach’s best.  It’s effective how the lawsuit is dealt with, and that the middle-aged Timothy returns to the obscurity from which he had briefly emerged.  (After the altercation with Jay, he’s not seen again bar a glimpse of him in Jay’s guilty imagination.)  Much less effective is Jay’s alfresco lunch in Tuscany, with Alba (Alba Rohrwacher) and his other festival hosts.  A hush suddenly falls over the table; Jay’s companions are all engrossed in their phone screens; one says ominously, ‘You’re all over the internet’.  Jay holds his breath, we’re meant to do the same – but we don’t, knowing that if someone had videoed Jay’s fight with Timothy, it would have gone viral days ago.  The video on the phones is, of course, a recording of Jay tackling the handbag thief; the silence breaks, excited chatter resumes.  There’s a tiresome running joke about Jay’s assumed liking for cheesecake, a standing dish in the catering for any event he’s at:  he insists to Ron et al that he got sick of cheesecake years ago.  Just before the ceremony in Tuscany, a subdued Jay automatically picks up a slice of cheesecake from the desserts table.  I hoped Baumbach was about to redeem the joke by having Jay, preoccupied with other thoughts, wolf down his bête noire entirely, before realising what he’d done.  Alas, he registers distaste after a mouthful or two and returns the plate to the table.

    Jay Kelly is hardly short of good actors but in many cases their roles are condescendingly written:  Baumbach and Mortimer, at least as much as the main character, treat them as satellites to planet Jay.  Adam Sandler is likeable as long-suffering Ron, juggling Jay’s capricious demands with his own family responsibilities, but these play as filler, despite Greta Gerwig’s efforts, mainly on the other end of a phone line, to liven things up.  A brief mention of Ron’s sometime romance with Liz – thwarted because her priority was her job with Jay – comes across as a token gesture to pad out Laura Dern’s skinny part:  there’s no further mention of Liz after she decides, before the train heads to Italy, to leave the party, in order to be with her son.  Grace Edwards’ Daisy is an appealing blend of humour, candour and increasing vexation but the outstanding supporting performance comes from Billy Crudup.  Shortly before the mood of their reunion shifts irrevocably, Jay reminds Timothy how, in their student group, everyone admired him as the true method actor among them.  He begs Timothy to read the restaurant menu – first without, then with, emotion.  Timothy obliges.  What Billy Crudup does in the next minute or so is hilarious, and elating – it’s not only the best moment of Jay Kelly but one of the screen highlights of the year.  Once his character comes out with his true feelings about Jay, you also realise, of course, how good Crudup was when Timothy feigned friendliness.

    The less satisfying acting contributions are linked to the screenplay.  Stacy Keach is one-note as Jay’s father, but the script has supplied no good reason for the character to turn up in Tuscany, where he repeatedly disparages his son, has a brief health scare then, despite Jay’s pleas, heads home.  Baumbach must like working with Lars Eidinger (who appeared in his previous film, White Noise (2022)) and as the crazy cyclist-thief, Eidinger certainly looks the part – but that part is underwritten to rather tasteless effect.  A more crucial problem comes in flashbacks to the young Timothy and Jay’s auditions for Peter Schneider.  They’re first seen in an acting class, where Timothy (Louis Partridge) is supposedly tremendous and Jay (Charlie Rowe) mediocre.  At the Schneider readings, Timothy is nervous and doesn’t do well:  he’s cut off after a few lines before Jay steps in to change both his and Timothy’s lives.  The contrast between the acting class and the audition doesn’t work, though, because Louis Partridge isn’t very brilliant in either.

    George Clooney is a twenty-four-carat film star and a first-rate screen actor.  He has some fine bits here:  in Jay’s reactions to Timothy’s menu readings; perhaps especially when Jay, looking in the mirror, speaks the names of other movie stars – Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Robert de Niro – while bleakly recognising that he’s stuck with being Jay Kelly.  (That’s as close as the film gets to connecting with the opening Plath quote.)   Clooney’s charisma, and emotional expressiveness behind the dazzling smile, are never in doubt, but Jay Kelly is such a questionable project for him.  The hectic prologue on the film shoot, leading into illustrations of Jay’s challenging diary and high-handedness, lend the story a satirical veneer, yet Jay Kelly is predominantly soft-hearted, and shallow.  When Jay is first on the train, his relish at rubbing shoulders with ordinary mortals is comically excruciating.  Unfortunately, Baumbach’s portrayal of the fans (played by, among others, Patsy Ferran and Jamie Demetriou) is so patronising that you can’t help feeling Jay isn’t alone in being up himself.  And it’s frustrating, given what the film is meant to be about, that, after Jay’s burst of authentic heroism, Clooney has no opportunity to show what that means to the man he’s playing.

    This can only be conjecture but I had a growing sense that Clooney himself, while attracted by the self-analysing pretensions of Jay Kelly, was more comfortable still with its amusing superficiality:  Jay’s putting his screen persona to real-life use in tackling the bad guy, is a clear example.  That misconceived closing montage of his own career highlights may reflect, as much as anything, Clooney’s affection for cinema and gratitude for the success he’s enjoyed through it.  At the very start, on the film set, Jay asks for another take that the director insists isn’t needed.  Baumbach rhymes this with Jay’s final reaction to seeing his past before his eyes, which brings tears to them.  Turning to camera, Jay asks, ‘Can we go again?  I’d like another one’.  Those words should be ambiguous – Jay wanting a second chance at making personal relationships work, at least as much as his movie career over again – yet the double meaning doesn’t come through.  The film’s ending succeeds chiefly in putting a seal on its sentimentality.

    12 October 2025

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