“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” says Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt. Roberts plays a beloved college professor who finds her loyalties torn between her colleague (Andrew Garfield) and her star student (Ayo Edebiri) after the latter accuses the former of having “crossed the line.” After The Hunt‘s marketing played up its nervy provocations, willingness to explore the tangled nuances within campus culture, and accusations of sexual abuse and misconduct. After a miniature boom of movies influenced by the #MeToo movement, After The Hunt seemed like it was aiming for a no-holds-barred dissection of life in a post-MeToo world. Instead, it feels almost pre-MeToo in its ideas, even though it’s clearly a film that wouldn’t exist without the past eight years’ worth of change. If the immediate aftermath of one of the entertainment industry’s biggest paradigm shifts promised empathy and change, After The Hunt dismisses that with a smarmy “both sides” refrain. If nothing else, though, that is in keeping with the times.
Reviews of After The Hunt have largely lambasted the film for its mealy-mouthed timidity and refusal to get any deeper on substantive issues beyond the basic markers. The Guardian called out the way “the laboriously nurtured ambiguity and complexity just become an evasive and noncommittal jumble of ideas,” while The BFI wryly noted that “After the Hunt feels like what you get when you emulate Todd Fields’ terrific Tár minutely, yet somehow miss its savagery.” Indeed, Fields’ piercing drama, about a legendary composer whose private abuses seep into her professional life, is mentioned frequently in reviews of After The Hunt. The complex cultural culpability and power dynamics that define both narratives are treated very differently, with Guadagnino offering no new perspectives or even having the nerve to be truly ambiguous about them. Especially when compared to films like Tár, After The Hunt lacks the kind of penetrating insight audiences need around a politicized battle that has helped define our lives—and influence our shifting pop culture—over the past decade.
In October 2017, a decade after Tarana Burke began using the “me too” terminology, both The New Yorker and The New York Times published extensive reports into allegations of sexual assault made against the infamous producer Harvey Weinstein. After this high-profile coverage came the wave. Major stars and power players were toppled from their pedestals and the staid institutions of power were forced to finally make incremental steps towards justice. It didn’t last long before the inevitable backlash began, but in that initial, almost-surreal rush of action and fury, it felt like progress. A new future didn’t seem unrealistic, and films sought to depict it.
Much like the instinctive first entries into COVID cinema, entertainment reacting to MeToo was initially defined by a rush to exclude the offenders. The detailed accusations against Kevin Spacey led Ridley Scott to entirely remove his performance from All The Money In The World, replacing him with Christopher Plummer through a mere nine days of reshoots. Other projects were shelved altogether. Spacey’s Gore Vidal biopic, anything with Weinstein’s name attached—even retro releases, some decades old, were suddenly absent from streaming platforms, like the Michael Jackson episode of The Simpsons. There was a reasoning behind this approach—there were so few tangible options available, why not try to hit abusers in their pocketbooks—and yet, it did feel a little like collectively putting our heads in the sand and convincing ourselves it was justice. Making the accused go away, rather than confronting the institutional rot and wider culpability of the system, is just easier.
As Weinstein awaited trial, #MeToo cinema began to take shape. A handful of films were heralded as the first wave of artistic responses to the case. Though The Assistant, Kitty Green’s astute and claustrophobic drama, never names Harvey Weinstein or even shows its predatory boss, critics immediately drew parallels thanks to its smothering portrayal of a toxic workplace ruled over by an unseen tyrant. Green had initially quit filmmaking after years of misogyny but returned to make this film, pivoting her focus to the entertainment industry after the Weinstein story broke—even interviewing former employees of The Weinstein Company. This was the first film of #MeToo to pull back the curtain on the industry’s biggest open secret.
Julia Garner plays the latest low-level hire at an entertainment mogul’s office, a position of thankless drudgery and crooked facades. She is endlessly humiliated by this creep but expected to clean up after his messes, sometimes literally; in one scene, she scrubs ominous stains from his office couch. She even writes him apologetic emails, pleading that she will “not let you down again.” She finds herself grateful, like a beaten dog, when she gets a secondhand compliment from her boss. It’s an act of humiliation, another way in which powerful abusers wield their might against others, and one that instantly had people thinking of Weinstein’s NDAs. The Assistant was the most literal response to #MeToo that wasn’t an actual biopic, and a much-needed rebuttal to decades of stories where sexy secretaries and domineering seductresses were the real enemy of the workplace (see the truly ridiculous Disclosure starring Demi Moore for the most notorious example.)
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