As novelist Alice Hughes (Meryl Streep) can’t fly to England to accept a prestigious award, publisher Karen (Gemma Chan) suggests she go by ship, and she can take a few people with her as guests. Alice choses her nephew, nonchalant Tyler Hughes (Lucas Hedges), and a couple of old friends she has not been in contact with for a number of years – Susan (Diane Wiest) is a giving person working as a legal-aid, and Roberta (Candice Bergen) is a sales assistant with a chip on her shoulder, because she believes Alice’s most famous book is based upon her and it ruined her life. Also on board is Alice’s publisher Karen, who really needs to find out if Alice’s latest book is a sequel to her most famous book or something original, and she enlists Tyler to help snoop on her behalf. The ship they’re crossing on is the Queen Mary 2; a luxurious cruise, with pokies, elegant dining rooms, dances and another famous writer on board, a pulp-crime writer named Kelvin Kranz, played by Daniel Algrant. Stephen Soderberg directs this film and it’s written by Deborah Eisenberg.
I was a little misled by the title; I think I was expecting a gossipy dramedy, with a few tension-driven misunderstandings. It’s difficult to describe a movie like this that is barely plot-driven; that is, it’s just dropping in on these people as they go about their lives. It’s through casual action and conversations that we fill in who these people are as characters – in the moment of writing this, I’m reminded of The Meyerowitz Stories as a comparison, although there are many. It’s funny, after Let Them All Talk finished, my streaming service quickly rolled me into an Anna Kendrick movie that I’d never seen called Happy Christmas, which is led by conversations and nothing much happens similarly. It was an outstanding comparison to indicate that a movie like this can be easily made well or poorly, and to care about the movie is to care about the content within the conversations and relations between our characters. I’m pleased to say that I liked Let Them All Talk very much – it’s about writing, and old friends reflecting backwards on their current situations. Through Lucas Hedges’ Tyler, it’s about bonding with someone for only as far as a cruise ship will take you. For me, that’s all in my wheelhouse, and whilst the prose is nothing as zippy as a Coen Bros. or a Quentin Tarantino masterpiece, I still found scenes between characters enthralling.
The setting helps; this ship is glorious to look at, and there’s always an extra sense of something special happening when you’re on holiday – I’m jealous, I wanna go on a holiday. But from here, I want to discuss the movie’s final revelations, and what happens to Alice Hughes in the end… Here I go… It’s almost cliché now that a diagnosis of death leads to finding clarity. It’s a common cinematic catalyst, that someone finds a fearlessness to do what you want when there’s only a few more months that matter. I suppose the tangible essence to be extracted from these stories is that all our lives are fleeting, could end any moment, so live every day, and live life to the fullest. But personally, in this case, I would have loved if terminal illness hadn’t been the conclusion. I wish the movie had forced itself to give a resolution, even if it was that Alice gives Roberta a check for some amount of money and they part ways, probably never speaking again. Alice has done a noble thing, inviting her friends to reconnect and it’s gone as much to plan as Tyler’s attempts to date Karen. The most Alice’s death resonates is with Tyler, who reflects on what just being with his Aunty has taught him, and I felt that. I think there’s a lesson in Let Them All Talk that’s meant to come through Roberta; that her resentment is unjustified, and comes about because she’s not a doer – she tries to pawn Alice’s final scribblings in the end where Susan has wrangled herself into profiting off her own experiences. I think it’s a valuable lesson, but the movie never tells us what exactly went down between Roberta and Alice’s novel back in the day, so I can’t really judge. But I do like Candice Bergen feeling out Roberta out, and along with Gemma Chan as Karen, they probably produce the most interesting characters.
I wonder if I’d enjoy this movie more or less a second time around, knowing what direction the story is heading now, where I perhaps ended up not worrying about it on my first viewing, due to just enjoying the breezy conversations among this party. Let Them All Talk is charming, and not so much a stretch to say poetic, in that it wants to communicate this journey of our characters with as little bull-twang as possible. I really like this line from Alice; ‘it’s like polishing the vase when the house is falling down’, referring to her manuscript in the face of what we think is her failed attempt to reunite old friendships, which are the richer things in life. I don’t think we ever find out what the private drink and catch-up Alice pushes hard with Roberta would have ever looked like if it occurred willingly either; bummer.
4.0
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