Sailing a ship of secrets and lies, with Streep at the helm
Filmed aboard the Queen Mary II 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.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s latest requires a rhythmic readjustment, for a relaxed tale of low-keyed intrigue among friends. They’re played by
Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen, so “Let Them All Talk” enjoys a lovely hangout factor. We’ve appreciated these women across several decades, 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 delineating a certain type of flattery-prone pill. 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) take up much of the crossing.
There are games afoot. Alice’s new literary agent, Karen (Gemma Chan), is also on the Queen Mary II, though Alice hasn’t been notified. Karen’s there to gather intel on Alice’s manuscript, rumored to be a continuation or sequel to her most commercially successful novel. 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 nonliterary ways to this no-nonsense but, to him, completely glamorous creature.
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.
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.
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.
R (for language) 1:53
Now streaming on HBO Max.