It’s difficult to faultSteven Soderbergh’sLet Them All Talkfor being indirect when indirection is its purpose. His new movie isn’t even about what’s left unsaid as much as the lengths people will go to avoid having the difficult conversations and honest moments they need even if they’re bound by love or lifelong friendship. In its best moments,Let Them All Talkshows how fragile all these bonds really are and why they’re worth cherishing, which is why we treat them so gingerly to begin with. In some ways,Let Them All Talkfunctions more as an anti-drama, avoiding direct conflict because in reality that’s usually what we do to preserve or develop relationships. And yet watching this approach play out,Let Them All Talkcontinually frustrates the audience despite the strong group of actors at the film’s center.
Alice (Meryl Streep) is an acclaimed author working on her next manuscript and set to receive a prestigious award in London. However, Alice doesn’t want to fly, so her agent Karen (Gemma Chan) arranges to have Alice take the Queen Mary II cruise ship on a transatlantic voyage from New York to England. Alice agrees, but only if she can bring along her nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges) and old college friends Susan (Dianne Wiest) and Roberta (Candice Bergen). However, this arrangement carries with it some ulterior motives. Karen wants Tyler to see if Alice is writing a sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; Roberta believes that the protagonist of that novel was based on her and wants Alice to admit it; and Alice is hiding a secret of her own. And yet through all kinds of social machinations, no one is really getting to the truth of what they want.
With its breezy tone, Soderbergh is clearly in no rush to get to any kind of dramatic confrontation. The luxury cruise ship setting is the perfect surrounding for this story because as we can see from this film, the way the ship actually works is kept out of sight from the passengers (you never meet the chefs or the people doing your laundry) while the attraction of the ship itself is the countless number of distractions available from swimming to board games to a library and more. Even though the characters are “confined” on a ship on a set course, this is the opposite of a pressure cooker. They can luxuriate away from what they really want to say, and so Susan spends most of her time reading trashy thrillers and Roberta tries to find a wealthy bachelor so she doesn’t have to go back to her retail job hocking women’s lingerie (Roberta’s also the most fun character in the ensemble and makes you wish that other directors realized that Bergen is still a treasure who can walk away with a movie if she chooses).
However, despite its light tones and luxurious setting, there is still in the background a “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” element. There’s clearly bad blood between Roberta and Alice that Alice doesn’t want to even acknowledge. Alice’s agent has recruited Alice’s nephew to basically spy on her. Standard rules of drama state that this has to come to some sort of confrontation to reach catharsis, but Soderbergh has never much been one for “rules” andLet Them All Talkthumbs its nose at bringing that kind of relief. And that’s fine, but it doesn’t seem to be in service to anything more than people are reluctant to be direct about what they want or what they believe, and perhaps Soderbergh and screenwriterDeborah Eisenbergbelieve the real drama is in this unspoken tension. But watching it play out, that tension lacks any kind of momentum. You can only circumvent the conversation for so long before the trick wears thin.
Like most of Soderbergh’s movies,Let Them All Talkis interesting. It may not have the dramatic heft ofTrafficorThe Limeyor the breezy fun of theOcean’smovies orLogan Lucky, but once you settle into what the film is aiming to accomplish, you can see how it’s a nifty spin on the character drama even if it doesn’t provide the payoffs we’ve come to expect from this kind of story.
