After a Decade of #MeToo Cinema, What Have We Learned?

In Kitty Green’s 2019 feature “The Assistant,” Jane, a recently hired junior assistant played by Julia Garner, attempts an intervention. Her boss, an unnamed, unseen, domineering film producer has brought aboard another young woman named Sienna. She’s new to the industry, from Idaho. This unsettles Jane, who asks for a meeting with the head of human resources. Too uncomfortable to take off her winter coat, Jane stumbles and stammers while trying to express her concerns, not over the new competition at the office, but for Sienna’s safety. Jane has experienced her boss’ verbal abuse, which would be bad enough, but she’s also seen signs of sexual exploits in his office. And she’s heard things. Predictably, her concerns fall on deaf ears, not merely rebuffed, but turned around on her by the HR guy, Wilcock, played to perfection by a banally disgusting Matthew Macfadyen. She’s putting her career on the line, he tells her, talking down, accusing her of jealousy while not-so-subtly making clear he knows exactly what Jane is talking about. It’s the futility that hits hardest; the insidious feeling that the deck is stacked, that everyone knows the truth, and that the only way to survive is to blind oneself.

“The Assistant” began as an idea about sexual misconduct on college campuses, but after dozens of women came forward accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault and rape in fall 2017, Green shifted gears. Weinstein’s name doesn’t need mentioning to know he’s the subject of “The Assistant,” but making him into a mere specter that looms over the office brings a clearer view of the systems of abuse people like him construct. The office is a complicity machine, where more minor abuses are routinized — a recurring bit in which Jane’s male co-workers help her craft emails apologizing to their boss are unsettlingly hilarious, or perhaps hilariously unsettling — providing the scaffolding for so much worse. When the Weinstein story broke, and the #MeToo movement exploded in its wake, it was inevitable that filmmakers would tackle it. Green was one of the first and boldest among them, though the film’s tiny budget and tinier box office take suggest the public wasn’t quite ready for her blunt, clinical honesty about the nature of institutional sexual abuse.

Six years later, Luca Guadagnino’s new film, “After the Hunt,” featuring big stars like Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield, has crashed and burned at the box office. It tells the story of a Yale ethics professor, Alma Imhoff, whose student Maggie, played by Ayo Edebiri, comes to her with an allegation of sexual assault against Hank, a friend and colleague in the philosophy department played by Garfield. The ensuing he said/she said drama stretches beyond the assault itself, exploring the warring interests of every party involved amid typical “cancel culture” paranoia and questions of ethical responsibility. Questions of abuse and complicity take a back seat to Guadagnino’s jaundiced view of human self-preservation and striving, where no character is noble and everyone is constantly balancing the complexity of their interior life with the perceived necessities of public performance. This is the end state of #MeToo cinema, less about the movement or the abuses it exposed than the solipsistic impulses that emerged in its wake.

It’s been a long road to get there, both for the movement itself, whose journalistic roots lay in the shock over Donald Trump’s initial election, and the culture it attempted to reshape. The extent of that reshaping is debatable, with general awareness of sexual abuses greatly increased and many workplaces introducing tougher standards, but a concurrent backlash that has seen many abusers escape true accountability and the return of Trump to the White House. It is perhaps a nasty sign of where everything was headed, that the other big, early entry in the #MeToo canon was 2019’s “Bombshell,” the Jay Roach film starring Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, alongside Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie, in a dramatization of the women at Fox News who exposed CEO Roger Ailes’ serial sexual harassment. At $32 million, its budget dwarfs the $1.4 million Kitty Green had to work with, visible in its glossy Hollywood charms. Its well-earned Academy Award for makeup and hairstyling attests to the superficiality of its creation, even as a film about that very superficiality. Received reasonably well at the time, the movie is now practically forgotten, its papering-over of Kelly’s own unsavory attitudes appearing only more farcical by the day amid her continuing far-right lurch.

“Bombshell” attempted to expose the ways image-oriented concerns of a propaganda factory hid the kinds of abuses it often publicly defended or obscured, as though this was some kind of revelation rather than an exercise in liberal schadenfreude. That it succumbed to surface-level sensationalism speaks to the ways Hollywood had yet to reckon with the rot in its own backyard, never mind what goes on other industries, including adjacent ones like news media.

A year later, Hollywood’s embrace of “Promising Young Woman,” the feature debut from “Saltburn” writer-director Emerald Fennell, only further exemplified the industry’s cluelessness. Zippy and stylish in an Instagram story way, the 2020 film stars Carey Mulligan as a med school dropout who spends her nights pretending to be drunk, letting men take her home and then, just as they’re about to assault her, revealing her ruse and … telling them not to do it again. The film’s grating visual references to exploitation cinema — drawn more from Quentin Tarantino’s appropriations of the genre than any evident familiarity on Fennell’s part — play up its twist on the traditional rape-revenge fantasy. That the offensively graphic assaults on women, and subsequent orgiastic violence wrought upon lascivious men, in ’70s and ’80s trash masterpieces like “Ms. 45,” “I Spit on Your Grave” and “The Last House on the Left” — all made by men — was deliberately designed to startle audiences out of complacency did not occur to Fennell. Instead, she crafted a film so dulled down that the characters who end up punished most harshly are the women, at the hands of Mulligan’s protagonist, Cassie. A particularly sickening sequence involves Cassie tricking an old classmate into thinking she’s been raped after getting day drunk together. Cassie, it turns out, hired a guy to take her blacked-out former friend back to a hotel room and leave her there.

When “Promising Young Woman” won the Oscar for original screenplay, many critics scoffed at the coronation of such a response to #MeToo, which wore the guise of a progressive fantasy, but whose moral compass was wildly askew. It’s the male lawyer, who spent his entire career defaming woman who’d accused men of sexual assault, that receives the warm touch of redemption, literally crying into Cassie’s lap as she tearfully offers him forgiveness. Meanwhile, Cassie purposely allows herself to be murdered, presumably allowing her a heavenly reunion with her best friend, who took her own life in the aftermath of her rape. The murderer, you see, was also the rapist, and at last he’s been arrested. Justice: Done. The charitable read here is a cynical commentary on the finality of violence women must endure in order for men’s crimes against them to be taken seriously, but that doesn’t really add up when you consider how Cassie lets most men off the hook while furthering the torment and degradation of women. In its way, the reactionary streak in “Promising Young Woman,” and the inability of Academy voters to recognize it, foretold the new status quo.

Less averse to violence was 2021’s “The Last Duel,” directed by Ridley Scott and co-written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and collaborator Nicole Holofcener. The medieval drama tells the story of the real-life assault of a French knight’s wife, Marguerite, played by Jodie Comer, and the judicially approved duel between her husband and assailant to settle the affront. By turns a funny, dramatic and harrowing film, its key gambit is its “Rashomon”-like structure, telling the story first from the husband’s perspective, then the rapist and finally Marguerite’s, all leading to the big, bone-crunching duel. Unlike Kurosawa’s classic, “The Last Duel” makes clear that Marguerite’s side of the story is the one to be believed, an approach given extra weight by Affleck and Damon bringing Holofcener on to write that section, a very post-#MeToo acknowledgement of their limited male perspective. Better known for writing wonderful indie dramedies like “Lovely & Amazing” and “Enough Said,” Holofcener’s contribution to the film is deeply felt. Where the earlier chapters evince a masculine interest in the dynamics of fraternity and honor, Marguerite’s chapter centers its attention on the troubling reality of simply existing in these men’s world, a perfect lead-up to the battle, in which the violence done to her explodes in a public spectacle of brutality. Her victimization is their contest in the end.

By 2022 — five years, a pandemic and another presidential election after the Weinstein story hit the pages of The New York Times — Hollywood was not finished addressing #MeToo, and in the most direct way. “She Said,” directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, stars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan as Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, respectively, the journalists at the Times who broke the Weinstein story. Attempting what “Spotlight” had done for the Boston Globe’s reporting on the child sexual abuses in the Catholic Church, “She Said” falls victim to both pedestrian craft and a nagging feeling that there’s something very back-patting about its fascination with Hollywood and celebrity. Not only starring famous actresses, the film features famous Weinstein victims like Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow playing themselves — Judd appears onscreen while Paltrow’s voice is heard. 

As a movement, #MeToo was questioned from the start for the fact that it took the victimization of famous white women to lend credibility to the abuse of those lower down the ladder. In “She Said,” though this uncomfortable fact is brought up, the production can’t help falling for the same unfortunate tendency. The result is a bland, often poorly written and acted display of self-congratulation for a Hollywood looking to move past the crimes and misconduct all that reporting uncovered. That it was produced by Brad Pitt — who by then had already been credibly accused of serious domestic violence by his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, and had continued working with Weinstein even after learning that he’d harassed Paltrow, his girlfriend at the time — only adds to the unpleasant air pervading the film.

The far more well-received “Tár,” released the same year, better satisfied everyone’s urge for a film about #MeToo that dealt with where the discourse had gone by that point. “Cancel culture” was the topic of the day, and Todd Field’s return to feature filmmaking 16 years after “Little Children” was greeted with widespread acclaim for its Kubrickian style and its tremendous central performance by Cate Blanchett, along with plenty of debate over its meaning and intentions. Crafted with an extreme sense of verisimilitude — to the point that many mistakenly assumed it was based on a true story — the film is about an orchestra conductor, Lydia Tár, a commanding, acerbic woman, who finds herself accused of blacklisting a former mentee and causing her suicide. Along with implications that Tár abused her position to engage in affairs with young women she employed, she also becomes the target of a smear campaign after she furiously derided a male student for his very “woke” perspective on music and life.

A handsome, thorny film, the success of “Tár” was also an indication of where cultural interests had moved. The abuses themselves are simply facts to be debated, but the psychology of the abuser is the meat of it. Making the abuser a woman — and a lesbian to boot — separates #MeToo from its more clearly feminist origins to make it a matter, simply, of power. What kind of person seeks such power? What kind of person contorts themselves beyond recognition to achieve it? How are they then haunted by their actions? What does their comeuppance look like? Aren’t they, ultimately, just absurd, laughable creatures doomed by their own narcissism? This presupposes that such people are regularly caught out, but reality begs to differ.

The influence of “Tár” on “After the Hunt” is unmistakable to the point that Guadagnino almost seems to poke at that film, dressing Roberts in similar clothing and having her ream out a too-woke student during a philosophy seminar. Its aims are different, though, not least because its central character is a bystander, neither victim nor abuser. Taking more after Woody Allen films than Stanley Kubrick — Guadagnino, ever the impish provocateur, made the film’s title credits resemble an Allen film — “After the Hunt” looks on the surface like a relitigation of by now well-worn arguments over #MeToo and cancel culture. In a way, it’s about both and neither. The original script for the film, by Nora Garrett, ended with Roberts’ character Alma doing “the right thing” and testifying on her student’s behalf. Guadagnino had Garrett drastically alter the film, both to maintain a small degree of ambiguity around the incident at the film’s center, but also to have Alma and the student fully fall out. In the film’s epilogue, Hank has landed on his feet somewhere less than prestigious, while Alma and Maggie have managed to do well for themselves in the wake of their sniping. Its final shot, of a $20 bill on a restaurant table, the sum total of their final interaction, tells the story. Years after the Weinstein exposé, the hunt now over and #MeToo fading in the rearview, what’s left is a few men who got punished, dashed hopes of female solidarity and the structures of power marching on.