Julia Roberts stars in After the Hunt. Photo / Amazon MGM Studios
Anyone who loves the Oscars remembers Julia Roberts’ best actress speech for Erin Brockovich in 2001.
At nearly four minutes, it’s legendary, iconic, joyful, unhinged, humble, a little self-centred, way too long and in the Top 5 of the 21st century - or maybe ever.
Who can forget her starting off with that famous laugh and immediately turning to the orchestra conductor and saying; “Sir, you’re doing a great job, but you’re so quick with that stick, so why don’t you sit, because I may never be here again?”.
Or, in the middle of thanking director Steven Soderbergh, laughing again, thrusting her Oscar in the air and crying out, “I love it up here!”.
Roberts earned her place up there not just because of a great performance, but also because of the many years she’d put into being the most charming woman on the planet, with a world of well-wishers for whom just seeing her hold that golden statue while beaming in a black-and-white Valentino was its own reward.
Julia. Never. Change!
The exciting thing to discover on Friday at the Venice Film Festival is that, well, she hasn’t.
For the first time in nearly 25 years, she might have a chance to prove herself wrong and get back up on that Oscars stage again.
If Roberts doesn’t make it all the way there for her turn in Luca Guadagnino’s thorny After the Hunt, it sure will be a blast watching her try - as demonstrated by the zingers she launched during a news conference as her castmates Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri cracked up in the background.
After just one question, she motioned to the cans of water sitting in front of everyone on the dais and said; “I would just like to invite all my castmates to open their cans so the noise doesn’t interrupt any of the incredible things we’re going to say”.
“She was like this every day on set. When her can had to be opened, everyone’s can had to be opened,” said Garfield, as Edebiri agreed.
“It’s like the microcosm of Julia Roberts.”
The buzz actually started on Thursday night with a pair of rare evening press screenings of After the Hunt (Roberts’ “juiciest role in ages”), a twisted cancel-culture thriller in which the fallout from a sexual-assault accusation in Yale University’s philosophy department ensnares everyone who touches it in a web of competing lies and motivations.
At the centre is Roberts’s Alma, a philosophy professor whose world is turned inside out when her favourite doctoral student, Maggie (Edebiri), accuses Alma’s close friend - and toughest competition for what may be only one tenure spot - Hank (Garfield) of raping her.
But it’s Alma’s less than immediately supportive reaction when Maggie tells her what happened that really sets the movie’s thorny sexual politics in motion.
When Hank tells Alma that Maggie’s accusations came after he’d confronted her about plagiarising her thesis, it’s hard to know whom she believes, or whom we should, particularly as her own moves dig her deeper into a scandal that she never asked to be a part of in the first place.
Is this an anti-#MeToo movie? Anti-feminist? Simply anti-privilege? Pro-skepticism? A muddled “humans are complicated” parable? A Rashomon riff? Is Alma out of touch or simply out to save her own hide?
Multiple critics pointed out that Guadagnino echoed Woody Allen’s trademark opening credit design (white Windsor Light Condensed letters with names in alphabetical order, set to jazz), perhaps broadcasting that the director has as much sympathy for the accused as the accusers.
In the news conference, he confirmed that he had been thinking about Allen and the way we look at the art of an artist who’s having problems. But he also just liked the way it looked.
“By the way, it’s a classic, that kind of font. It goes beyond Woody now,” Guadagnino said.
Whatever message After the Hunt is sending, it’s not landing well.
The movie’s Tomatometer score is at 48%, not great for a film from a beloved director featuring the comeback of a megastar and two well-liked younger actors, and a movie that initially looked from its well-cut trailer to be an instant Oscar contender. (The movie premiered out of competition at Venice.)
Confession, as a non-critic: I went to Yale, and I’ve never met a single person who talks like this movie’s wool-clad academics, who throw references to Kierkegaard and Foucault and “performative discontent” and “the perceived existence of a collective morality” into casual conversations.
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman described After the Hunt as “a realistic academic soap opera,” while Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote; “It’s not quite the heady intellectual drama it wants to be”.
What’s not up for debate, though, is that Roberts is great in it. Who knows what prodded Roberts to re-engage with being an actor who’s also a movie star, instead of the other way around, but let’s hope it lasts.
Deadline’s Damon Wise, calling her performance “astonishing,” wrote that the movie “may be a shock to unwary audiences lured in by Roberts’ star wattage”.
Comparisons to another recent cancel-culture movie, Tár, are inevitable, but that part allowed Cate Blanchett to tear up the screen while having a total breakdown.
Roberts is given the tough task of playing a prickly person who guards her privacy at all costs and is defined by what she doesn’t say.
Meanwhile, at Venice, Roberts charmingly eviscerated every journalist in her path, even though half the questions were in Italian.
She was such a convincing active listener - not to mention the only American on the dais not wearing translation headphones - that I was positive she was fluent until she heard her name and nonchalantly placed one earpiece to her head.
The question was from an Italian woman who asked whether she thought the movie could be accused of being politically incorrect.
Roberts: “I just love the softball questions early in the morning”.
See also her response to Garfield, saying every character in the movie is an unreliable narrator and believes themselves to be the hero of the story: “I would just say, agreeing with Andrew, that, yes, I am the hero of the film”.
To an Italian journalist who wanted to know what she loved about Venice: “I had a great tour planned this morning, but I’m here,” she said, with a mock look of disappointment that got a ton of laughs.
When someone’s cellphone rang in the middle of one of her answers, without a millisecond of hesitation: “Should we hold for that?”.
The movie, Roberts said, wasn’t meant to be universally liked.
“We are challenging people to have a conversation and to be excited about that or infuriated by that … We’re just sharing these lives for this moment, and then want everyone to go away and talk to each other.
“That, to me, is the most exciting bit, because we’re kind of losing the art of conversation in humanity right now. And if making this movie does anything, getting everybody to talk to each other, that is the most exciting thing that I feel we could accomplish.”
And when one female journalist told Roberts that the movie had caused controversy among other women leaving the press screening who thought it was setting back feminism by having Roberts’ character question Maggie’s rape accusation, the actress considered it carefully and asked the reporter to “give a little morsel” more on what she meant.
“Not to be disagreeable, because it’s not in my nature” - everyone gave a knowing chuckle - “but the thing that you just said, Maria, that I love is that it revives old arguments,” Roberts finally answered.
To Roberts, the film questions whether we have really entered a postfeminist society.
“The best part of your question,” Roberts said, “is you talking about how you all came out of the theatre talking about it.
“And that’s how we wanted it to feel, that everybody comes out of all these different feelings and emotions and points of views and you realise what you believe in strongly and what your convictions are, because we stir it all up for you.”
She grinned big - she loves it up there! - and put a pin in her answer.
“So, you’re welcome.”