Luca Guadagnino misfires with this bafflingly overlong, overwrought #MeToo campus accusation drama from screenwriter Nora Garrett, broadly in the tradition of David Mamet’s Oleanna or Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. It is worryingly muddled and contrived, perhaps in need of further script drafts to excavate a clearer and more satisfying drama inside.
Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri star, with Andrew Garfield and Michael Stuhlbarg in supporting roles; they are all doing their considerable best, each frankly hampered by the unfocused and uncertain characterisation in the material itself, which, by the time it finally reaches its coda-finale of confrontation, is almost bizarrely inert, anticlimactic and incoherent. The movie is clenched with its own sense of contemporary relevance and risky blurred lines, saddled with an almost deafening score that often grinds straight through the dialogue; the drama becomes an atonal quartet of self-consciousness. One particularly weird and unearned mannerism is periodically introducing a pointlessly loud timebomb-style ticking on the soundtrack, something brought out in lieu of actual suspense but which never leads to anything as clear or interesting as an explosion.
The scene is Yale University and the action is prefaced by an intertitle announcing “It happened at Yale …”, perhaps hinting at some specific true story. Guadagnino evidently had permission to film at Yale itself, showing locations such as the iconic Beinecke library, so Yale is apparently on board with the film at some level. Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a brilliant and charismatic philosophy professor, a longstanding champion of feminist issues, idolised by her star student Maggie Price (Edebiri), whose parents are rich enough to make many donations.
But some people, including her psychoanalyst husband Frederik (Stuhlbarg), whose behaviour toggles oddly between sweetly uxorious support and petulant complaint, think that Alma has unbecomingly allowed herself to be flattered by a student with a crush, and family wealth. Meanwhile, Alma is up for tenure, in competition with her flirtatious colleague Hank (Garfield), who is a close friend but perhaps wants to be more than that. After a boozy, daring smoking-indoors party hosted by Alma and Frederik, Maggie is walked back to her student accommodation by a clearly drunk Hank. Hours later, she reappears on Alma’s doorstep with a terrible accusation, which Hank denies. Alma must decide where her loyalties lie in this intersectional crisis.
But the laboriously nurtured ambiguity and complexity just become an evasive and noncommittal jumble of ideas, and Alma’s health issues and the strange discovery that appears to kickstart the action look very contrived. And the scene in which Roberts puts the smackdown on an irritatingly woke student in class doesn’t have a fraction of the power of Cate Blanchett’s imperious conductor doing the same thing in Todd Field’s Tár. Some old-fashioned Yale rigour was needed.
