Review: Let Them All Talk

Everyone is keen to find out what pretentious yet insecure Pulitzer Prize-winning author Meryl Streep is working on at the moment, including her new literary agent (Gemma Chan). Streep is up for a literary award, and she’d be thrilled if not for the fact that it’s in England. Chan comes up with the solution of a long cruise with free passage. All Streep has to do is give literary lectures on board. Streep agrees but only if she can bring her two old friends (Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest) and her nephew (Lucas Hedges). Chan also manages to sneak herself on board with the goal of finding out just what Streep has been working on. Could it be a sequel to her most infamous and contentious work for which Bergen holds a long-time grudge over? And why has Streep invited these three people (two of whom she hasn’t seen in decades)?

 

“Shut Them All The Hell Up”, more like it. Director Steven Soderbergh (“sex, lies, and videotape”, “Erin Brockovich”, the dreadful “Unsane”), screenwriter Deborah Eisenberg (the spouse of actor Wallace Shawn with her only screenwriting effort thus far), and a fairly high-calibre cast got together for this dreadfully dull, shockingly amateurish HBO Max movie from 2021. Barely a damn thing happens, most of it is dialogue, none of it is remotely interesting unless Gemma Chan is involved. Did we really need another film about a novelist whose previous work pissed people off for being too close to the bone? Talk about played the hell out.

 

Debate seems to be had over how much of the script was improvised, but even if a lot of the dialogue was improvised…it seems poorly improvised by a bunch of people who should’ve known better. It lacks bite, wit, incisiveness…anything, really. In fact, I’m pretty sure I could tell what was improvised (or at least pretentiously made to sound improvised) : These were the worst scenes in the film that just seemed stilted and agonisingly mundane. Candice Bergen seems especially lost, and it’s actually rather painful watching her to be honest. Her bitter, opportunistic character is hard to like and even harder to understand. Even the usually fine Lucas Hedges and pros Meryl Streep and Dianne Wiest (as the perennial peace-maker) aren’t able to do much here, though Hedges gives just about the only natural performance in the film. His character’s participation however seemed rather hard to believe. What guy that age wants to hang out with his elderly Aunt and her two friends on a cruise? I did like Wiest adopting twelve-letter expletives though. That’s a new one for her on screen, and got a chuckle out of me. She also gets the film’s one good stretch of dialogue, a speech about the stars, the night sky, and long-held petty bullshit. The rest sucks. It doesn’t help that almost all of these characters are rather frosty, pretentious, and not especially likeable. Wiest and Hedges probably play the only halfway likeable characters, though Streep is certainly well-cast. In fact, if you’re a Meryl fan you’ll probably want to bump the rating up a bit here. Gemma Chan has some charm and charisma in an underwritten part, I’d like to see her in literally anything else. I particularly strained to believe she could evade Streep whilst on a cruise ship for so long. That was absurd.

 

Sigh. I really do try to like Soderbergh’s films, but yet again I’m out of the loop. This feels like Soderbergh attempting to do Woody Allen circa “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”…and doing it even worse than Woody. Boring, amateurish, surely these talented people could’ve come up with something more interesting than this waffling, clichéd piffle? Pointless and lacking in any character development at all. A total waste, though I’m sure I’m in the minority here.

 

Rating: D