The credits of Steven Soderbergh’s new film, “Let Them All Talk,” don’t quite tell the truth. The movie ostensibly stars a quintet of formidable actors (Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, Dianne Wiest, Lucas Hedges, and Gemma Chan) in a drama that takes place mostly during an ocean crossing aboard the Queen Mary 2. But the real star of the movie is the ship itself. The result is something of a boat show, in which the actors become—what’s the opposite of a backdrop?—the foregrounded pretexts in a story that grinds through its paces in order to showcase the variety of the ship’s own spaces and surfaces, confines and vistas. Even there, Soderbergh’s artistry is somewhat confined—indeed, he deftly weaves the constraint, perhaps even the frustration, into the action. Yet “Let Them All Talk” offers enough surprises of tone, pleasures of mood, and piquantly composed images to carry the film through with a sort of visual music, compensating for the dramatic thinness without overcoming it.
The story of “Let Them All Talk,” written by Deborah Eisenberg, involves the creation of stories. It’s centered on Alice Hughes (played by Streep), a celebrated New York novelist who is struggling with her new novel. Alice has won a prestigious British award that her new agent, Karen (Chan), wants her to go and collect, for publicity’s sake. Alice has an inhibition against flying, so Karen arranges for her to go by ship, and Alice invites a trio of guests to join her: her longtime friends Roberta (Bergen), who works in the lingerie department of a Dallas department store, and Susan (Wiest), a lawyer in Seattle representing victims of domestic violence, along with her nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges), an inchoate student type from Cleveland, to be her factotum. There’s also a mystery guest (John Douglas Thompson), who accompanies Alice at a distance (and whom Tyler spies slipping out of her room in the mornings), and Karen herself, who boards the vessel unbeknownst to Alice and plans to approach her, in the course of the crossing, for word about her next novel, about which she has disclosed nothing.
Karen and her publisher are hoping, in particular, for a sequel to Alice’s most popular novel—one that Alice apparently based largely on Roberta, who had confided in her as a friend and instead found her personal life displayed on the page, recognizable to all who knew her. After that novel came out, decades earlier, the friendship broke; now Alice’s shipboard reunion with Roberta leads Karen to surmise that Alice is planning a sequel based on the same character. Alice—who, in a public talk aboard ship, expounds her lofty conception of literature as a sort of spiritual communion—has nonetheless developed her art, as Soderbergh portrays it, on acts of predatory betrayal. As a contrast to Alice and her practice, there is another passenger on the ship: a rich writer of popular mysteries named Kelvin Kranz (Daniel Algrant). Roberta and Susan are fans and are excited to find him there (he cheerfully signs autographs for his crowds of admirers), but Alice derides his prose as “Styrofoam” and his utterly impersonal plots, assembled on the basis of library research, as “jigsaw puzzles.”
There’s nothing Styrofoam-like about Soderbergh’s visual prose: doing his own camera work, under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews, he exults in the glitzy surfaces and mighty architectural lines, the garish lighting and the cavernous grandeur, the paradoxical blend of ostentatiously superficial luxury amid the enveloping natural astonishments of sea and sky. Yet the plot of “Let Them All Talk” is as puzzle-like as a potboiler, and it depends, dramatically, on having no point of view. Although Alice is the main character, the movie never gets into her mind, except for two quick and inconsequential exceptions, one at the beginning and one at the end. Alice’s view, and even her awareness, of her literary debt to Roberta remains unclear; her relationship to the mystery guest remains unclear; the subject of her new novel, which she works on diligently throughout the voyage, remains unclear. The movie’s characters exist only to the extent that their relationships fit together—like the notches in jigsaw pieces. The ambiguities of the story are factitious; the movie depends largely on what Alice clearly knows but doesn’t disclose, what those around her try to guess on the basis of the tidbits of information that they extract, espy, or steal.
The paradox of the impersonal personal is the defining trait of Soderbergh’s art. Over all, his films are composed of opposing artistic tendencies: one to make movies spontaneously, lightly, with his two hands and an artisanal passion, the other to make movies that ring with the industrial solidity of a clean dramatic exoskeleton. In his best films—such as “Magic Mike,” “Behind the Candelabra,” “High Flying Bird,” and parts of “The Laundromat”—dramatic clarity and simplicity merge with a hands-on sense of swing and verve, of passionate physical vitality that doesn’t merely adorn the story but informs it, even converges with it to become the drama’s very subject, its very idea. The more that Soderbergh manneristically distorts his stories with extreme moves and gestures, with the flair of his own technical prowess and passion, the more he reveals their essence—and himself.
I was surprised to learn that much of the dialogue in “Let Them All Talk” is improvised, because the movie’s construction is so taut and compressed. (In a recent interview with the Daily Beast, Soderbergh called it “highly structured improvisation” on the basis of Eisenberg’s script, and estimated “the ratio at about 70-30, in terms of improv versus scripted dialogue.”) This looseness of production appears to have prompted Soderbergh to film noncommittally—to multiply angles in order to be able to edit scenes to appear no less precise and consistent than if they were scripted. (Soderbergh also does his own editing, under the pseudonym of Mary Ann Bernard.) As if to compensate and overcompensate for the loose production, the movie is distractingly smoothed-out and well groomed. Although the film’s actors may have been freer than usual during filming, that freedom is invisible in the final product; meanwhile, the images, for all their incidental allure, are tethered not just to the actors but to the dialogue and feel less free than in Soderbergh’s best movies.
In “High Flying Bird,” the impulsive physical energy of the visuals have an intellectual underpinning in the form of references to the sociologist Harry Edwards and his book “The Revolt of the Black Athlete”—along with an oracular character (played by Bill Duke)—which burst through the film’s texture and drama. In “Let Them All Talk,” there’s only the trace of such an underpinning and a hint of such a dramatic disruption, in brief shots that show the ship’s crew behind the scenes, wheeling cases through corridors and at work in the kitchen, where hundreds of pancakes and other delicacies are plated. This is the part of the ship that’s only hinted at in the movie—the backstage part, the part where the work to keep it running, to sustain the material basis and theatrical illusion of its passengers’ experience, takes place. There’s one remarkable moment, in particular, that indicates what’s missing from the film, and why it’s missing: Alice, wandering alone in the warm light of the passengers’ wood-panelled, brass-knobbed hallways, passes through a curtain of transparent plastic streamers to enter the fluorescent-lit, bare-white-walled clinical bareness of the crew’s working space. There, she’s quickly greeted by a member of the staff, who tells her that the area is off limits to her and to all passengers, owing to insurance.
“Let Them All Talk” is built on an unfulfilled longing to film in that area, to merge the public and private sides of the ship’s voyage, to see both realms of activity, each on its own, and together in their inevitable interactions. In the Daily Beast interview, Soderbergh described the shipboard experience. “It’s a really stunning engineering achievement, this ship. This is not a case where you see it on screen and it looks great, and when you go on the ship in real life, it’s not as great. It’s as good as it looks,” he said. “I would come home from the editing room on board, back to my room at 2am, and there were cleaning crews everywhere. They’re obsessive.” The crews and their obsessions are what make “Let Them All Talk” possible; Soderbergh, who’s also obsessive about process and method, displays his fascination with the ship but, with his focus on the foregrounded story, doesn’t show the underlying action. With its absence, he has subtracted the personal element from his impersonal-personal artistry.
