An average movie

Even though this movie had been rather poorly received, with a such a director and cast involved, and since it was already available on Amazon Prime, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it didn’t turn out to be a total disaster, I would still agree with the critics with this one as the damned thing indeed didn’t really work out, I’m afraid. For Luca Guadagnino, you might want wonder if the guy didn’t become too productive lately as it is rather risky to release a movie almost every years (‘Challengers’ was really good though). Concerning the cast, I have never been a huge of Julia Roberts and I had some serious about her playing a super intelligent academic but I have to admit that she was actually pretty good as she did disappear behind her character. Concerning the rest of the cast (Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg), in contrary to Roberts, they always delivered some stellar work in the past and they didn’t disappoint me here. Unfortunately, even though the running time was quite extensive, all their respective characters were poorly developed, they were also acting either kind and benevolent and then massively manipulative and borderline devious when it was needed for the makers to make a point. As pointed out by most of the critics, the main issue was with the writing eventually. I read somewhere that, before it was released, there was quite some buzz because it was Nora Garrett’s first script and that, right from the start, she got to work with such a prestigious director and cast. Well, even though she display some potential, I’m afraid she is not quite there yet. The first mistake she made was to add so many plot lines dealing with Julia Roberts’s character. Her marriage with Michael Stuhlbarg‘s character was rather loveless (from her side) and onesided, she obviously had an affair with Andrew Garfield’s character, Ayo Edebiri‘s character was in love with her (like most of her students, male and female), she was on the verge of getting her tenure, she had some kind of mysterious disease and she had a traumatic paedophile love story when she was younger. Seriously, with all this, you can make a whole TV show… The funny thing is that she wasn’t even involved in the main event at the center of this story. Another issue was the fact that, even though everything single of these characters was supposed to be really smart, they all turned out to be so vapid and obnoxious after all. The fact that they all acted as being victimized was also rather infuriating. It also reminded me that, even though most Americans would argue that going to college was the best time of their lives, well, as displayed in this movie, it can be actually pretty dreadful. Finally, even though I’m all for protecting women against men and their perverted ways, this movie also displayed that, ever since the #Metoo thing, you can now never be sure when you have sex for the first time if it will be the start of a beautiful love story or the start of a public or judicial process which will ruin your life forever. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I still think it is was a decent watch but there is no doubt that it could have been so much better considering the talented people who were involved. 

6/10