Sailing a ship of secrets and lies, with Streep at the helm
Filmed aboard the Queen Mary 2 during a real transatlantic crossing, HBO Max’s “Let Them All Talk” is a drolly successful example of experimental filmmaking. The experiment is that it’s a genteel, sneakily reflective comedy — stateroom-comedy subdivision.
As with actual days spent on actual luxury liners, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest requires a rhythmic readjustment, for a relaxed tale of low-keyed intrigue among a small group of old friends. They’re played by Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen, so “Let Them All Talk” enjoys a lovely hangout factor. We’ve known and appreciated these women across several decades and so many characters, and Soderbergh clearly sought out as little external or yellow-highlighted acting as possible.
The characters in screenwriter Deborah Eisenberg’s scenario reunite after many years at the invitation of an imperious author struggling with a book deadline and heading to England to pick up a literary prize. Meryl Streep plays Alice, the author. She’s extraordinarily precise, even in semi-improvised dialogue, at delienating a certain type of flattery-prone pill (at the outset, at least). Alice agonizes over the difficulty of finding the right words at the keyboard,
and the struggle to “worry those into existence.” Away from the keyboard, she struggles in a different way to relate easily with old friends or new acquaintances.
“Let Them All Talk” establishes Alice as a paragon of emotional evasion, whose initially strained, gradually unguarded conversations with her Seattle friend Susan (Wiest), her Dallas friend Roberta (Bergen) and her Cleveland nephew and social wrangler Tyler (Lucas Hedges, Oscar nominee for the masterly “Manchester by the Sea”) take up much of the crossing.
There are games afoot. Alice’s
new literary agent, Karen (Gemma Chan) is also on the Queen Mary 2, though Alice hasn’t been notified. (That part doesn’t quite wash: She’s hoping never to bump into her?) Karen’s there to gather intel on Alice’s manuscript, rumored to be a continuation or sequel to her most commercially successful novel. Yay! But what if it’s a sequel to the difficult, commercially hostile masterwork Alice herself vastly prefers? Karen enlists the younger Tyler as a sort of spy; Tyler complies, and finds himself drawn in non-literary ways to this no-nonsense but, to him, completely glamorous creature.
Decades earlier, Alice apparently pilfered whole chunks of Roberta’s real-life travails for one of her novels. Now Roberta’s broke, looking for companionship as well as financial relief, and she seeks a little renumeration from Alice. “Here’s to reconnecting the gang of three we used to be,”Alice says, over a shipboard toast early in “Let Them All Talk.” The reconnections don’t come easily.
Soderbergh and Eisenberg set their course for what you might call an interior adventure. A bestselling author of thrillers (played by filmmaker and writer Dan Algrant) is also on the crossing, and Alice dismisses the mere thought of this pulp sensation’s existence until he introduces himself, trades a little small talk and charms the ladies. Here and there, the storyline leans into some conventional mystery and suspense elements. Who’s the man Tyler sees exiting Alice’s stateroom at odd hours? When will Roberta confront Alice about her literary pirate act?
Working quickly with a portable RED Komodo digital camera and a couple of pieces of lighting equipment, Soderbergh keeps the set-ups clean and efficient. Like so much of his recent work, from “Logan Lucky” and “Unsane” to the more commercially viable “Magic Mike” and “The Knick,” he’s a filmmaker interested in genre tropes to a certain degree, beyond which he’s not interested at all, unless they’re used to support character and peculiar, telling comic details. At one point Tyler and Karen hit the ship’s disco lounge, and the way Soderbergh films their few, strained seconds on the dance floor is hilarious, and brief. And then we’re onto something new.
The movie, as scripted with evident, easy-breathing contributions from the cast, explores a writer’s impulse to use what she knows, and who she knows, for the purposes of fictionalized truth. “You betray the people you love the most,” Alice acknowledges at one point, with an “expectation of forgiveness.” Composer Thomas Newman’s snappy bossa- and swing-derived Henry Mancini-esque musical score suggests one sort of movie, and I’m not sure “Let Them All Talk” is really that movie. The movie at hand is small, I suppose, and it may not be enough for some audiences.
It’s enough for me. For a streaming premiere laden with plot machinery, you can check out “The Prom” on Netflix — the other Meryl Streep project we’re getting this week.
‘LET THEM ALL TALK’ 3 stars (out of 4). Rating: R (for language). Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes. Available on HBO Max.