Let’s not bury the lede: “After the Hunt” gives Julia Roberts her best role as a film in at least 20 years. It is both a big statement – two decades is long at any level, an eternity in the years of films – and weaker praise than for a star of the Stature of Roberts. In the loaded and secure moral drama of Luca Guadagnino, she is in turn, in turn, anxious and distant, guarded and confusing, intellectual and sensual, sexy and closed, a victim, a villain and an illegible sphinx. In a cinematographic scene still tilted against substantial parts for older female actors, the verification of two of these contradictory notes would be a fairly good performance: the filmography of the last days of Roberts, in particular, wanted for such a range.
This is the kind of delicate and thorny role that Tilda Swinton, one of Guadagnino’s main favorite ladies, has enjoyed his career. For Roberts, a multiplex multiplex darling, it looks more like a flex. This factor of surprise is partly what gives performance, and the film as a whole, its impact: a history of heavy campus policy rewriting in real time in a post-metoo era, “after hunting”, specifically pivots on the facets, the impulses and the unexplored weaknesses of the people you think you know. Now, in his fifth decade on the screen, Roberts is ready to surprise us again.
Anyone who was not alive – or at least the age of the cinema – in the early 90s might not understand how Julia Roberts was a big problem when she broke into the stage. Spring 1990, in particular, has seen an inauguration of accelerated film star which industry rarely allows today. On March 20, the Inguee, 22, arrived with the boyfriend of the time, Kiefer Sutherland, at the 62nd Oscars, where she was both a presenter and a nominated to the actress of the best actress, based by certain experts to win after having taken a Golden Globe for her vineyard in all the stars of “Magnolias Steel”.
She lost against the Irish character actor Brenka Fricker in the sleep of Arthouse “My Left Foot”, but no matter: three days later, a little Romcom supported by Disney called “Pretty Woman” opened its doors in American theaters. Maybe you’ve heard of it. The expectations were not particularly high, since Roberts was not yet a familiar name and that the star of the first beak Richard Gere was in career crisis. However, he went beyond the box office this weekend, defying industry predictions to stay in the top ten for 16 weeks. Budgeted at only $ 14 million, he ended up taking more than $ 463 million worldwide.
The film, generic made and written, was pretty cute on paper; Gere was perfectly well in it. But it was Roberts who made it a phenomenon: his sassy comic timing, his girl vulnerability, her big red hair and her big white smile and her big dirty laugh, all raised a tart in stock with a heart character on one of these supernova roles higher than the sum of his parts. The criticisms laughed when “Pretty Woman” won him a second consecutive appointment to the Oscars, this time in the best actress, but some breakthroughs are too obvious to deny. She lost again, this time against Kathy Bates in “Misery”, but she was officially in the club: you would have bet at the time at the time on her by winning a sooner or later.
It turned out that it would take a decade – after a period of untouchability, a drop in career and a flamboyant return. For a while, after “Pretty Woman”, the name and the face of Roberts could sell anything, of films below “Dying Young” and “Sleeping with the enemy” to millions of magazines fixed on his romantic life then tubulent, followed by tabloids with a fervor to correspond to the current Taylor Swift industry. The public’s interest has decreased in the middle of the decade, while failures, including “Mary Reilly” and “I love troubled”, fell in trade, before Smart Romcom as “my best friend of My Best Friend” and “Notting Hill” recognized it.
As “Erin Brockovich” arrived at the beginning of 2000, the 32 -year -old star practically resembled an industry veteran – and the small -scale legal drama but with a high impact of Steven Soderbergh as the summary of his career to date. There remains the par excellence vehicle of Roberts: the role of Brockovich, an entirely American woman who achieves extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances, called both his comic skim skills Whipcrack and her empathy on the warm screen and in slightly more gray territory. It was a commercial smash, of course, sticky in the popular imagination all year round: when Roberts finally took the best actress Oscar the following spring, it looked like one of the most predetermined victories in the history of the Academy.
Where to go from there but below? Roberts’ 21st century cinematographic career had her moments – among others, she was a game team player in the films “Ocean’s Eleven”, had fun in Vampy nasty in the “mirror of the mirror” underestimated by Tarsem Singh in the Drawovich of Mike Nichols – but that’s right to say that she did not have “Erin Brockov
She marked a fourth sign of the Oscars (in support, although it is really a role of co-leader) for an admirably Steely tour in the face of Meryl Streep in the disappointing “August: County Osage”, but her appearances on the big screen in the last decade have been rare and banal. Played significantly from mom’s roles in “Wonder” and “Ben is back”, moving with George Clooney in “Ticket to Paradise”, booming for the dour Netflix “Leave the World Behind” – everything was like a sub -optimal use of one of the big stars of the living cinema in America.
Enter “After the Hunt”, which you could call for a return to form, except that we have never seen Roberts in this form: his tight and rarely deployed smile, under a frowning of exhausted eyebrows, under shiny blonde waves. She embodies Alma Imhoff, a professor of philosophy of Yale who ends up by the intermediate house placed in a volatile dispute of sexual assault between the ladle Career Academic d’Andrew Garfield and the anxious student of the doctorate of Ayo Edebiri. It is not for this piece to disclose what the secrets or uncertainties Alma are home to, although the performances of Roberts give it both an impressive poker face and panic and imprudent lightnings of terror and need: the various myself younger in Alma, continue to jump from behind his medium age compound fist.
From the filmography of Roberts, the temperature here can be the closest to that of “closer”, although in its themes of Calone Culture, institutional paranoia and the transgenerational feminist in August – or not – “after hunting”, will surely invite comparisons to Todd Field Field “Tàr”, which marked a third) to the nomination of bones (and very almost, a third) Oscar. There is. You can certainly imagine Lydia Tàr and Alma Imhoff as headquarters for dinner, when it is not a section to consider how Blanchett could have played Alma in all its folded and retained complexities.
But it is a thrill to watch Roberts, an actor whose charisma and compound adorability were his signature for a large part of his career, ending in these deep gray areas, to play the tired irony that comes with age, and to handle knowledge – 35 years after the naivety cindrelle of the “pretty woman” – this weapon, a weapon, an increasingly rare basic. The actor’s warmth is still very present; Alma, after all, is a woman whose status is based on the admiration and friendship of others. But it is conditional here and turns on a penny. “Everything is not supposed to make you comfortable,” she said to the character of Edibiri at some point in the film, and the line may also seem a warning to longtime fans of Roberts The Romcom Queen. Let us see how the academy, and indeed Hollywood in general, responds to it in difficult mode – and how much the star, unlocked after too many less difficult projects, is willing to take this path.
