Producers: Brian Grazer, Luca Guadagnino, Jeb Brody and Allan Mandelbaum   Director: Luca Guadagnino   Screenplay: Nora Garrett  Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, Lío Mehiel, David Leiber, Thaddea Graham, Will Price, Ariyan Kassam, Christine Dye and Burgess Byrd   Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: C

Prolific director Luca Guadagnino begins his latest with starkly simple black-and-white titles and a jazzy underscore that inevitably call to mind the style of every Woody Allen film you can remember—a cheeky choice for a film about allegations of sexual harassment in a rarefied intellectual environment.  And Nora Garrett’s script for “After the Hunt”—a title that fully applies only when one reaches the coda—is at its core a “he said/she said” story set in 2019, at the pinnacle of the “Me Too” movement.

But anyone expecting a cut-and-dried, unambiguous treatment will be sorely disappointed.  In fact the film is a positive riot of ambiguity that, in the end, wrings bleakly humorous observations about academia, accusations of sexual misconduct and so-called cancel culture out of an upper-crust melodrama with semi-tragic overtones.  The picture is a muddle unsatisfying to the very end, but there’s a method, however misguided, behind the narrative clumsiness and misdirection, and there are nuggets of brilliance along the way.  One might be aggravated by this “Hunt,” but will probably be fascinated by it too.

The focus of the story is Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor at Yale whose seminars are dynamic performances that exhibit both her arrogant sense of command and her glee in inflicting withering criticism on her cowed students.  (Yet she’s revered by them, it seems.)

At a party that she and her psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) are hosting as the film begins, she and her younger colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) are the showiest of the faculty among the group, while the grad students in attendance, most noticeably Alma’s prize pupil Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), whose doctoral thesis she’s mentoring, mostly sit quietly and watch the academic antics.  So does Frederik, smiling impishly from the sidelines while preparing food for the guests.

In the course of the evening some major plot points emerge.  Hank, whose semi-obnoxious manner and sarcastic banter mark him as both charismatic and off-putting (as well as flirtatious), and cool, composed Alma are both up for tenure (in truth both actors seem rather old to be at their sixth year of teaching, Hank by a little and Roberts by a lot); Frederik wonders whether their friendship could survive if only one of them were chosen. 

And there’s something unsettling about Maggie.  Not only is she acutely sensitive as a black woman whose presence on an Ivy League campus might be thought the result of preferential treatment rather than merit; the fact that she’s the daughter of incredibly rich parents whose gifts have benefited the university she obscures with an ostensibly radical lifestyle.  She’s also sneaky: while visiting a bathroom and searching for a roll of toilet paper, she discovers, hidden in a cupboard, an envelope containing materials about Alma’s past, and eagerly rifles through them, nursing what they tell her as ammunition.  Then she leaves the party with Hank.

The next day she comes back to see Alma and tearfully tells her that drunken Hank had walked her to her apartment and then sexually assaulted her.  She intends going public with the accusation and asks for Alma’s support.  Not long afterward Hank meets Alma at a restaurant and swears that the charge is untrue; he explains that he’d found evidence of plagiarism in Maggie’s thesis (on ethics, no less) and told the girl of his intention to report it, and that her accusation was designed to preempt an investigation.

The situation quickly escalates.  Hank is abruptly fired, and Maggie takes her story to the press, attacking Alma’s dithering in the process.  Alma berates Maggie, goading the girl into slapping her, and insults her roommate, trans activist Alex (Lio Mehiel).  She also consults her friend Kim (Chloë Sevigny), a psychologist who serves as a student counselor, about Maggie, but also forges an order on Kim’s prescription pad for opioids to self-medicate a series of crippling abdominal cramps from which she’s suffering.  Revelation of that will lead Dean Thomas (David Leiber) to suspend her tenure process.  An unexpected visit by Hank to the apartment Alma has kept on the sly proves that their relationship has been far more than merely professional, and a medical emergency ultimately leads to the revelation of the secret about Alma’s past, involving accusations Alma she once made as a child about an older man, with tragic result. It’s that incident Maggie had discovered in her snooping.

Then there’s a postscript, set five years later: a meeting between Alma and Maggie that shows the changed circumstances of them both, and represents a reconciliation of sorts that’s also a confession, despite the surface amity as frigid as the Connecticut winter outside.  It doesn’t really resolve anything, particularly the question of who—Maggie or Hank—was telling the truth about the night that changed things for everyone; the behavior of them both—Hank not only was outraged over his treatment but later was sexually aggressive toward Alma, while Maggie was more pleased with herself than embarrassed—made them both suspect. Indeed, the implication is that the “truth” was different for each person (or perhaps indifferent as far as either was concerned), and that, now as then, it can’t be simply pinned down. Moreover the scene ends with a word that abruptly pivots from the supposed “truth” of what we’re just seen to remind us it’s fiction, despite an opening caption that told us “It happened at Yale.”

Throughout “After the Hunt” almost makes a point of straining credulity; if you’ll looking for rational behavior in this academic setting—an exaggerated, satirical one—you’ll be hard-pressed to find a shred of it, except in Sevigny’s Kim who, despite a haircut that must be seen to be disbelieved, is all too convincingly recognizable in her pose of disdainful cynicism.  Alma, Maggie and Hank are all over-the-top characters, each in his or her own way, and the actors embody them with passion, though Edebiri’s is a cunning, simmering anger as opposed to the rage that Roberts and Garfield exhibit more openly.  Even Frederik who, even more than Kim, represents a voice of reason in the wacky scholarly community, is hardly conventional; there’s a wicked gleam in his eye as he analyzes what’s going on, and he can shift from solicitude for Alma to jealousy over her attachments to others with drama queen fervor, as when he flounces about the kitchen distractingly while Alma and Maggie are struggling to have a serious conversation. 

But it’s actually more fun watching Stuhlbarg go to town with the character than it is witnessing Robert and Garfield, good as they are, engage in their academic games or erupt as the cruelty of their circumstances bear down on them, or Edebiri claim moral superiority while manipulating them to her own ends.  Among the supporting cast a special nod is due to Leiber, who in a relatively few scenes captures the wimpiness of academic administrators who, despite feigned annoyance over having to attend to style over substance, have spent their careers honing the ability to do exactly that.

On the technical level Guadagnino is fortunate in the work of production designer Stefano Baisi, who contrives to make British locations a convincing facsimile of the American ones, and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, who captures the faded elegance of both the public and private places.  Marco Costa’s elliptical, often frantic editing distracts as often as it enlivens, and the modernist tings and twangs of the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross irritate rather than entrance, but their efforts contribute to keeping the atmosphere unsettling despite the surface decorum.

As a commentary on the excesses of professional and sexual politics in elite American academia, “After the Hunt” comes across as a bit behind the times, as well as opaque and messy about what it’s trying to say.  But at least it keeps you intrigued, if not satisfied.           

Producers: Greg Shapiro, Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim   Director: Kathryn Bigelow   Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim   Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Malachi Beasley, Brian Tee, Brittany O’Grady, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Willa Fitzgerald, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kyle Allen, Kaitlyn Dever, Francesca Carpanini, Abubakr Ali, Neal Bledsoe, Nicholas Monterosso, Jared Reinfeldt and Angel Reese   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

A great film has been made about the dangers of nuclear weapons.  Unfortunately, it’s not this one by Kathryn Bigelow, but Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove,” which used absurdist humor to encapsulate the insanity of the Cold War arms race.  Bigelow’s modern-day take, based on the proliferation of nuclear weapons that’s occurred in the intervening sixty-plus years, is by contrast an earnest, sober cautionary tale, more akin to Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe,” which appeared roughly at the same time as Kubrick’s acerbic satire and left much less of a lasting impression.  You might think of it as a companion piece to Nicholas Meyer’s 1983 telefilm “The Day After,” except with a title change to “The Day Before.”

The setup of the script by Noah Oppenheim (who contributed to episodes in the “Maze Runner” and “Divergent” franchises and wrote Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie”) is simple: a single ballistic missile has been launched from somewhere in the Pacific against the continental U.S.—the trajectory is eventually determined to wind up in Chicago—and the unnamed President (Idris Elba) must decide how to respond. 

But instead of constructing the story in a straightforwardly chronological fashion, Oppenheim has divided it into three acts, the last two of which repeat the action of the first but from differing perspectives.  Meanwhile Bigelow, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and editor Kirk Baxter are working overtime to energize things with hectic movement and frantic cutting, always abetted by Volker Bertelmann’s doom-laden score.  But the repetitious recounting of the countdown to the missile’s impact ironically undermines the impact of the film as a whole.

The initial chapter moves back and forth between two locales.  One is a military base in Alaska, where Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) oversees a crew seated at monitors that show satellite observations of the skies.  Suddenly an object appears—a missile, its precise launch point unknown, streaking toward the United States, which it’s primed in reach in less than twenty minutes. The focus shifts to the situation room in the White House, where Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) serves as second in command to Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke).  Shocked by the reports, they’re soon video-conferencing with senior officials to determine how to respond to the emergency, which grows exponentially more dangerous when interceptor missiles launched from Alaska fail to down their target.  There are periodic shifts to Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram), a FEMA supervisor who’s ordered to take refuge in a bunker outside Washington, and Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), the young Deputy National Security Advisor called on to make swift recommendations when his boss is unreachable.

Then we move to the second chapter as General Anthony Brody (Tracy Letts), the senior officer of the U.S. Strategic Command, arrives at his post, ordering extra sugar in his coffee while grumbling about a baseball game he’d watched the night before.  His attitude changes when he’s placed onto the conference call, and his bellicose inclinations about how to respond are contrasted with Jake’s more measured recommendations as contact with foreign governments suggest that Moscow and Beijing deny responsibility but claim they’ll have to prepare their forces if U.S. retaliatory measures escalate.  Contact with Ana Park (Greta Lee), the NSA’s North Korea expert who’s spending the day with her son at a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg, can offer little but generalizations.

The final chapter finally introduces Elba as the President, hitherto only heard on the video call, as he’s quickly removed by the Secret Service head (Brian Tee) from a photo op with a girls’ basketball team for a helicopter ride to the bunker with his military aide (Jonah Hauer-King), who advises him on retaliatory options while he confers with his overwrought Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) as the countdown to detonation in Chicago inexorably proceeds though, unlike in “Strangelove,” we don’t see the actual explosion—leaving open myriad possibilities (does the warhead fail? Does the missile even carry one?).

Kubrick masterfully built up tension throughout his film even while shifting from character to character and place to place, and garnering huge laughs in the process.  Bigelow, who proved so skillful with suspense in “The Hurt Locker” and “Detroit” (and sheer terror if you go back to “Near Dark”), is hobbled by Oppenheim’s three-chapter approach, which effectively brings us to the same cliff three times before ultimately refusing to jump off.  It’s a strategy that proves as much a failure as those interceptors, whose missed opportunity causes Reid to bellow about having wasted fifty billion dollars on a coin-toss and Admiral Miller sadly admits, “There is no Plan B.”

The movie’s further weakened by the effort to humanize the sketchy characters with domestic references.  At the very start, Gonzalez is in a funk over a phone call with his wife, and later the President gets into contact with his (Renée Elise Goldsberry), who’s off in Kenya.  Olivia’s lieutenant Davis (Malachi Beasley) was about to propose to his girlfriend, and Walker herself takes time to phone her husband (Neal Bledsoe) and tell him to put their son (Nicholas Monterosso) in their car and just “drive west”—a curious directive if they’re in Washington and the missile is headed for Illinois.  Baerington too is concerned for his wife (Brittany O’Grady), a congressional aide.

But certainly the worst example of this soapoperatic padding involves Reid, who seems emotionally unsuited to his job to begin with, but goes virtually apoplectic when he learns that the rogue missile is headed for Chicago, where his estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) is living.  He calls her to reconnect, only to find that she has a new live-in boyfriend (Jared Reinfeldt), and though that seems to offer him some small comfort, the weight of his inability to respond to the missile threat leads him to literally take the jump that Bigelow and Oppenheim are unwilling to.

To give the film its due, it’s competently made technically.  In addition to Ackroyd and Baxter, one can point to perfectly adequate work from production designer Jeremy Hindle, costumer Sarah Edwards, the visual effects team led by Chris Harvey and sound designer Paul N.J. Ottoson, whose efforts complement Bertelmann’s.  As to the cast, some—Harris especially, and to a lesser extent Elba and Letts—come across too broadly, but most play their thin characters without overdoing things. Everyone behind the film is clearly earnest about issuing a warning about the continuing danger posed by nuclear weapons. 

But while “A House of Dynamite,” which the last chapter uses as a title to suggest the precarious state of a world order that’s come to accept their proliferation as a fait accompli, raises alarms about what’s unquestionably a real issue, by the close its sense of urgency has dissipated in a welter of melodramatic contrivances and—if you’ll excuse the phrase—bombastic excess.