DD: The 63rd New York Film Festival wrapped up this past weekend with Bradley Cooper’s third film as a director, IS THIS THING ON?, we have a good idea of the films that will play out the rest of the year and vie to be taken seriously by audiences, the entertainment press and the industry that will be looking to see which films make money and which ones deserve Academy Award Nominations. Our film critic, HJ, reports on two films opening this week after taking their bow at the festival.
HJ: After the Hunt started at the Venice FF before making its N. American debut as the opening night film at NY. It’s directed by the Italian Luca Guadagnino, now 54, who has over the last decade or so made films in English, often with his friend, Tilda Swinton, once with Timothee Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name in 2017. Here Julia Roberts, who plays Alma, a Yale philosophy professor teaching Ethics, goes head to head with her prize student Maggie, played by Ayo Edibiri, who alleges that Hank Gibson, another philosophy professor, played by Andrew Garfield, sexually assaulted her after a faculty house party. How this all plays out will affect Alma. She’s in it up to her neck, it’s her department, her prize student, Hank is something more than a colleague, and she has tenure on the line.
Alma is also married to Frederick, a sexless owl of a psychiatrist played by Michael Stuhlbarg, given to spouting omniscient truisms, as he did as the Dad in Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. The incestuousness of campus life gets dog-park yappy as Nora Garrett’s script snakes its way through the Me Too vs Not Me argument. Which is festooned with conveniently placed tawdry character flaws that the script rations out one by one to each of the players. Edibiri plays the brilliant ethics student who has plagiarized her PhD thesis, snoops through her mentor’s bathroom cabinet to find some extramarital pictures –isn’t that where everyone keeps them?— while Alma, the ethicist, has kept an apartment in New Haven’s grittier nabe for side trysts with Hank, the maybe assailant.
The script propels Edibiri’s student victim forward with terrier like determination to disrupt the ritually polite, white academic culture that this film loathes for its pretentious silliness and parodies for its parties where Nietzsche and Heidegger witticisms zing around the teacups of ginseng. Edibiri’s black lesbian student grievance against the world of the white male in this film’s Yale tale is an extension of her role as the itchy, anxious sous chef on the hit series, The Bear. The consciously modest white on black end-credits steal from Woody Allen, as if After the Hunt is a lost companion piece to Woody’s Match Point or September. It isn’t.
Amazon releases straight from the NYFF into area theatres this weekend, then to stream.
Katheryn Bigelow has made a career entering the male preserves of directing police and military thrillers –think Blue Steel, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Strange Days and K19: the Widowmaker, a 2002 film with Harrison Ford about a rogue Russian nuclear sub. Call that perfect training for A House of Dynamite 23 years later, a nightmare countdown film tracking a nuclear missile launched at the US from an unidentified south Asian site.
The film is an editor’s drum solo. Here Australian editor Kirk Baxter -- his ed-creds are great The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Social Network, even backwards in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button-- stitches together a downward spiral of plot loops filmed by British war film cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, whipping through set pieces of rooms in Noah Oppenheim’s script tracking the missile’s progress as it zeroes in on Chicago, city of 10 million. Bigelow’s great cast – Rebecca Ferguson at intelligence, Idris Elba as the President, Tracy Letts as the trigger-ready, mad general (suggested by the real life general Curtis Lemay), Jared Harris as the forlorn Scty of State -- variously command the early warning room in Alaska, the Pentagon control room, the White House Situation Room, the State Department, FEMA. With each rotation to a new room, Oppenheim’s script moves the story down one notch toward Defcon 1.
And in each room, the job falls away, and the characters can’t say what they know.
Bigelow is masterful at precision ticktocks, while sifting the social cues of American men and women from different circumstances and generations under pressure from common threat. The template for A House of Dynamite, filmed as an inside look at the world’s worst day, could be a transcript of what was said inside JFK’s situation room long ago during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Which the 1964 film, Dr: Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by director Stanley Kurbick and writer Terry Southern, played out as a black comedy. Imagine that last scene of Slim Pickens as Major King Kong riding the warhead down to earth in Dr Strangelove -- but without the comfort of a sardonic laugh. In A House of Dynamite Bigelow lets you fill in the blank at the end.
A House of Dynamite also started at the Venice festival;, showed here at NY, and Netflix opens it this weekend in theatres and streaming Oct. 24.
