A literary voyage
Soderbergh and cast craft a deeply thoughtful, story
LET THEM ALL TALK
★★★★★ out of 5
Cast: Meryl Streep, Gemma Chan, Lucas Hedges
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Duration: 1 h 52 m
Available: Crave
Meryl fans, rejoice. This is that rare celestial conjunction, a twoStreep week.
Fans of the singing, dancing, Mamma Mia! Meryl can partake of The Prom, coming to Netflix Dec. 11. And those in the mood for a literary Streep (think Little Women or even Adaptation) can tune into the latest from I'mretired-but-not-really director Steven Soderbergh, on HBO Max. It's also on Crave — making it, unlike Wonder Woman 1984, an HBO offering actually coming to a small screen near you.
Let Them All Talk doesn't really feel like a Soderbergh movie — whatever that even is, given that his last three were the sport-drama High Flying Bird, the economic-malfeasance-comedy The Laundromat and the shot-on-aphone Unsane. Instead, it plays out like the best Woody Allen film of the past decade, the one you keep hoping he'll make in spite of, well, everything.
Streep plays Alice Hughes, a self-obsessed U.S. author who's just won Britain's fictional but clearly prestigious Footling Prize. She tells her agent Karen (Gemma Chan) that she can't cross the pond to accept it because she can't fly. Karen proposes a berth on the Queen Mary 2. Alice counters by suggesting an entourage.
Thus is she joined on the ship by her favourite nephew (Lucas Hedges) and old university friends Susan (Dianne Wiest) and Roberta (Candice Bergen). Also aboard is another famous author (Dan Algrant), his airport-thriller output dwarfing Alice's works in quantity if not quality. And there are several other mysterious men who pique the women's interest. Roberta seems to be looking to marry a millionaire, albeit without the assets of a Monroe, Grable or Bacall.
The dialogue is sharp, which is even more impressive when you consider that most of it was improvised from rough outlines of various scenes by writer-professor Deborah Eisenberg, who gets the film's sole screenwriting credit. And that most of the low-budget production took place over two weeks on the Queen Mary 2, during an actual transatlantic crossing.
Carrying the subtitle The Fall of 2019 (which sounds ominous when you consider how far we've fallen since), Let Them All Talk does just that, featuring fascinating conversations and soliloquies on the difficulty of human connection, the mystery of creative inspiration and the debt writers owe to their sources.
This last topic is of particular concern to Roberta, who confides to Susan over numerous board games — Monopoly, Clue and a round of Scrabble that includes the word “betray” on a triple-word score — that she's long believed Alice plumbed her life for literary inspiration, and ruined it in the process.
At the centre of this literary vortex sits Alice, who has teased her agent with the news that she's revisiting one of her earlier books. Everyone hopes it's a sequel to You Always You Never, which we learn has been turned into both a movie and a miniseries. But of course her most popular work is also her least favourite, for perhaps that reason.
The gentle pace of the tale suits the anachronistic ocean liner setting. In fact, Let Them All Talk made me yearn to follow in their wake and cross the sea by ship, which in this year is saying something. Soderbergh and his talented cast have crafted a deeply thoughtful, intelligent story. If it were a book, it would be one you couldn't put down.