Let’s not bury the lede: “After the Hunt” gives Julia Roberts her best film role in at least 20 years. That’s both a big statement — two decades is a long time by any standard, an eternity in movie-star years — and fainter praise than it should be for a star of Roberts’ stature. In Luca Guadagnino‘s charged, sure-to-be-debate-stirring moral drama, she gets to be, by turns, anguished and aloof, guarded and unhinged, intellectual and sensual, sexy and closed-off, a victim, a villain and an unreadable sphinx. In a film scene still tilted against substantial parts for older female actors, checking off just two of those conflicting notes would be a pretty good showing: Roberts’ latter-day filmography, in particular, has wanted for such range.
It’s the kind of tricky, prickly role that Tilda Swinton, one of Guadagnino’s favorite leading ladies, has feasted on in her career. For Roberts, a onetime multiplex sweetheart, it feels like more of a flex. That factor of surprise is partly what lends the performance, and the film as a whole, its impact: A story of fraught campus politics rewriting themselves in real time in a post-#MeToo era, “After the Hunt” specifically pivots on the unexpected facets, impulses and weaknesses of people you only thought you knew. Now in her fifth decade on screen, Roberts is ready to surprise us again.
Anyone who wasn’t alive — or at least of moviegoing age — in the early ’90s might not understand just what a big deal Julia Roberts was when she burst onto the scene. The spring of 1990, in particular, saw a fast-track movie-star inauguration the likes of which the industry rarely permits today. On March 20th, the 22-year-old ingenue arrived with then-boyfriend Kiefer Sutherland at the 62nd Academy Awards, where she was both a presenter and a Best Supporting Actress nominee, tipped by some pundits to win after taking a Golden Globe for her winsome part in the all-star ensemble of “Steel Magnolias.”
She lost to Irish character actor Brenda Fricker in arthouse sleeper “My Left Foot,” but no matter: Three days later, a little Disney-backed romcom called “Pretty Woman” opened in U.S. theaters. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Expectations weren’t especially high, given that Roberts wasn’t yet a household name and first-billed star Richard Gere was in a career slump. Yet it topped the box office that weekend, defying industry predictions to stick around in the Top Ten for a whopping 16 weeks. Budgeted at just $14 million, it wound up taking over $463 million globally.
The film, generically made and written, was cute enough on paper; Gere was perfectly fine in it. But it’s Roberts who made it a phenomenon: her saucy comic timing, her girlish vulnerability, her big red hair and big white smile and big dirty laugh, all elevated a stock tart-with-a-heart character onto one of those supernova-making roles greater than the sum of its parts. Critics sneered when “Pretty Woman” landed her a second consecutive Oscar nomination, this time in Best Actress, but some breakthroughs are too obvious to deny. She lost again, this time to Kathy Bates in “Misery,” but she was officially in the club: You’d have bet the house back then on her winning one sooner or later.
As it turned out, it would take another decade — following a period of untouchability, a career dip, and a blazing comeback. For a while after “Pretty Woman,” Roberts’ name and face could sell anything, from subpar movies like “Dying Young” and “Sleeping With the Enemy” to millions of magazines fixated on her then-turbulent romantic life, tracked by the tabloids with a fervor to match the current Taylor Swift reporting industry. Audience interest waned by the middle of the decade, as duds including “Mary Reilly” and “I Love Trouble” tanked commercially, before smart romcoms like “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Notting Hill” won it back.
By the time “Erin Brockovich” came along in early 2000, the 32-year-old star seemed practically like an industry veteran — and Steven Soderbergh’s small-scale but high-impact legal drama like the summation of her career to date. It remains the quintessential Roberts vehicle: the role of Brockovich, an all-American everywoman achieving extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances, called on both her whipcrack comic skills and her warm onscreen empathy, and coasted on her megawatt star quality while pushing her dramatic range into slightly grittier, earthier territory. It was a commercial smash, of course, sticking in the popular imagination all year: When Roberts finally took the Best Actress Oscar the following spring, it felt like one of the most preordained wins in Academy history.
Where to go from there but down? Roberts’ 21st-century film career has had its moments — among others, she was a game team player in the “Ocean’s Eleven” movies, had vampy villainous fun in Tarsem Singh’s underrated “Mirror Mirror,” and showed a different, chillier side in Mike Nichols’ thespian hothouse drama “Closer” — but it’s fair to say she hasn’t had another “Erin Brockovich.”
She scored a fourth Oscar nod (in supporting, though it was really a co-lead role) for an admirably steely turn opposite Meryl Streep in the disappointing “August: Osage County,” but her big-screen appearances in the last decade have been infrequent and unremarkable. Sensitively played mom roles in “Wonder” and “Ben is Back,” goofing around with George Clooney in “Ticket to Paradise,” grimming up for the dour Netflix oddity “Leave the World Behind” — it’s all felt like suboptimal use of one of America’s great living movie stars.
Enter “After the Hunt,” which you might call a return to form, except we’ve never quite seen Roberts in quite this form before: her smile tight and infrequently deployed, beneath a set frown of tense exhaustion, beneath brittly shellacked blonde waves. She plays Alma Imhoff, a Yale philosophy professor who winds up the hazardously placed middle-woman in a volatile sexual assault dispute between Andrew Garfield’s louche career academic and Ayo Edebiri’s anxious Ph.D student. It’s not for this piece to divulge what secrets or uncertainties Alma is harboring, though Roberts’ performance gives her both an impressive poker face and panicked, reckless flashes of terror and need: Alma’s various younger, less assured selves keep jumping out from behind her pristinely composed middle-aged mien.
From Roberts’ filmography, the temperature here may be closest to that of “Closer,” though in its themes of cancel culture, august institutional paranoia and cross-generational feminist allyship — or not — “After the Hunt” will surely invite comparisons to Todd Field’s dazzling “Tàr,” which netted Cate Blanchett an eighth Oscar nomination (and very nearly, one suspects, a third win) three years ago. You can certainly imagine Lydia Tàr and Alma Imhoff as dinner-party seat neighbors, while it’s not a stretch to envision how Blanchett might have played Alma in all her folded, withholding complexities.
But it’s a thrill to watch Roberts, an actor whose dialed-up charisma and lovability has been her signature for much of her career, burrow into these deep-gray areas, to play up the weary irony that comes with age, and to wield the knowledge — 35 years after the naive Cinderella fantasy of “Pretty Woman” — that sex can be a weapon, a currency or an increasingly rare commodity. The actor’s warmth is plenty present still; Alma, after all, is a woman whose status rests on others’ admiration and friendship. But it’s conditional here, and turns on a dime. “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” she says to Edibiri’s character at one point in the film, and the line may as well sound a warning to longtime fans of Roberts the romcom queen. Let’s see how the Academy, and indeed Hollywood at large, responds to her in hard mode — and how far the star, unlocked after too many less challenging projects, is willing to travel down this path.
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