The new movie from Steven Soderbergh, who directed “Traffic” (2000), “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001), and other films so numerous that he may have forgotten making them, is titled “Let Them All Talk.” It stars Meryl Streep as Alice Hughes, a distinguished American novelist who has been awarded something called the Footling Prize. (Can that really be the name? I do hope so.) In order to receive it, she must go to England, but she won’t fly. Instead, she condescends to travel by water, roughing it in a two-story suite on the Queen Mary 2, from New York to Southampton. She is accompanied by her nephew, Tyler (Lucas Hedges), plus two old friends of hers from college, Susan (Dianne Wiest) and Roberta (Candice Bergen). One is an advocate for imprisoned women, in Seattle; the other sells lingerie in Dallas. Alice hasn’t seen either of them in decades, so now is a chance to catch up. Such is the quartet of characters on whom this movie turns. It should be called “Ocean’s Four.”
One disappointment is that all of them, arriving on board, are politely conducted to their cabins. Boring! As any follower of the Marx Brothers can tell you, on the strength of “Monkey Business” (1931), the best—and certainly the most fragrant—means of embarking on a luxury liner is to stow away in a barrel marked “Kippered Herring.” There is a secret passenger in the new film, named Karen (Gemma Chan), but the only person she’s hiding from is Alice, who, en voyage, will be working on the manuscript of a new book. It’s rumored to be a sequel to one of her earlier successes, and Karen, having recently become Alice’s literary agent, yearns to discover what it’s about, and to chivvy along the creative process. This involves recruiting Tyler to spy on his aunt and to report back, the sole result being that Tyler starts to fall in love with her. With Karen, that is, not with his aunt. That would be weird.
To be honest, Karen’s part in the story is slight to the point of absurdity, and there’s something equally thin in Alice’s motives. If the plan was to revisit the past with her sisterly pals, why does she scarcely make contact with them, except at dinner? “It’s really important that I know something of their state of mind,” she says to Tyler, thus burdening the poor boy with yet more espionage, but why that’s important to her remains obscure, and, indeed, the first half of “Let Them All Talk” is barely there as a movie. Soderbergh seems to be sketching out ideas for a plot, and gingerly feeling his way into its moral possibilities, as if he were clinging to a rail, beside a heaving sea. And yet the Atlantic stays calm.
Most of the action was filmed on the Queen Mary 2, during a crossing in August, 2019, and you’re never entirely sure to what extent the resident mortals are aware of the stars who have descended among them. Does the helpful member of the ship’s crew, giving directions to a lost and elegant lady, even realize that she is in the frame with Meryl Streep? “Let Them All Talk” belongs to the gang of speedy, shot-from-the-hip movies—like “Bubble” (2005), “Unsane” (2018), and “High Flying Bird” (2019)—that Soderbergh likes to fire off now and then, using the lightest and least obtrusive tools for the job. One of his legacies will be the encouragement of younger filmmakers, who will watch his no-frills ventures and say to themselves, “We may not have a Streep, but we’ve got a coffee machine, a script, and an iPhone 12. Let’s do it.”
The hardest thing to replicate, for any novice, will be the surreptitious ease with which, in the latest film, Soderbergh shifts gear. Gradually, against all expectation, we find ourselves in a serious and somewhat Jamesian drama, strewn with riddles. Who is the fellow who, observed by Tyler, emerges from Alice’s room every morning? Could Susan be the first person on record to discuss her distant sexual history while playing Monopoly and Scrabble, and, if so, does a threesome count as a triple-word score? And what is Roberta’s beef? The movie treats her ungallantly, I reckon, looking down on her as a gold-digger and an emotional desperado, yet there is genuine force when she suddenly says, of Alice, “I am convinced she asked me on this trip to find out what happened to me after my divorce. She wants to write about it as a sequel to her fucking book.” Ah, that old lament. Despite protestations to the contrary, every novel is a roman à clef, for readers who are privately acquainted with the novelist. Most of them, moreover, persuade themselves that they are the keys that fit.
But wait. Also aboard is another novelist, a mystery-monger named Kelvin Kranz (Dan Algrant), who outsells Alice, many times over. Needless to say, she deems herself his artistic superior, and the film is worth seeing for a delicious moment of pure Streepery, when Alice and Kelvin meet in the dining room. She asks him, “How long does it take you to write one of your”—she flutters her fingers, as if brushing off dirt—“your books?” Three or four months, he replies. “Oh, that’s longer than I thought!” she says. Ouch. The joke’s on her, though, for Kelvin is a gentlemanly soul, who admires Alice’s work, and it’s gratifying to see Susan curled up in bed with one of his best-sellers. What I longed for was a closeup of Alice, too, sneakily plucking “Fugue State,” “Boiling Point,” or another gripping Kranz from the shelves of the ship’s library and smuggling it to her room. Imagine her lapping up every word, her face aglow with envy, snobbery, thrills, and guilt. Sadly, Soderbergh can’t bring himself to take that illuminating step.
One mystery that even Kranz couldn’t solve is: Where’s Elvis Costello? “Let Them All Talk” is the opening number, pumping and brassy, on his 1983 album, “Punch the Clock.” In the film, however, we never hear it. (The succeeding track, “Every Day I Write the Book,” which may be the best song ever written about writing, would also be a nice fit for this movie.) Instead, the score is by Thomas Newman, whose jazz compositions are, I guess, better suited to Soderbergh’s narrative riffs. Much of the tale has a noodling and speculative air, and, if you’re braced for shipboard shenanigans, as in “The Lady Eve” (1941), forget it; the romance between Karen and Tyler is a nonstarter. Oddest of all is the fact that, when Alice, as requested, delivers a public lecture to her fellow-passengers, she addresses her thoughts—“What a miracle it is that consciousness emerged,” and so on—to a full house. Give me a break. I’ve been on the Queen Mary 2, from America to England, and, believe me, the folks on that noble vessel are in no mood for miraculous consciousness. They want to shop.
For fuchsia’s sake, the heroine of “I’m Your Woman,” Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), lounges around in a gauzy peignoir trimmed with fur. It still has the sales tag attached, suggesting that it was stolen rather than bought. Unhappy, bored, and home alone, Jean has tried in vain to have children—a hole in her life that is repaired, without warning, when her husband, Eddie (Bill Heck), returns one day with a baby. Where it hails from, and who its parents are, Lord knows; nonetheless, what a thoughtful gift. Jean names it Harry.
Soon afterward, in a further surprising development, Jean is hustled out of the house and compelled to go on the run. Eddie is a crook, he’s messed up, and now somebody’s seeking revenge on him and his loved ones. Typically, though, he’s not around, and so the fleeing Jean is attended by a guy named Cal (Arinzé Kene)—a placid and capable sort, who drives her and Harry to a safe location and leaves them there, with plenty of diapers, food, and formula. More loneliness ensues. The movie, which is directed by Julia Hart, may have the outline of a thriller, but the gaps are filled with waiting.
The time is the nineteen-seventies B.C.—before cell phones, that is. (The ubiquity of them, I’d argue, has proved fatal to the crime film; information can now be instantly shared rather than being withheld in the interests of suspense or lost because of a missed call.) The cars of the period are like whales on wheels, lumbering and wallowing along in the course of a chase. There’s also a splendid, disco-driven sequence at a club, where the beat is interrupted by gunfire. Jean, clad in a glittering jumpsuit, takes refuge in one of the club’s phone booths, and we glimpse the chaos from her point of view, as the customers race past in a terrified stampede.
“I’m Your Woman” needs these dynamic interludes, because the rest of it, alas, feels dangerously numb. Remember the rollicking tone of “Raising Arizona” (1987), another kid-kidnapping saga? Well, swing to the opposite extreme and you come to Hart’s movie, where nobody rollicks at all. Conversation is pause-heavy; smiles are fleeting and tight with anxiety; the plot is a knot. True, there’s a smoothly controlled performance from Marsha Stephanie Blake as Teri, who also has Eddie troubles. But why is everyone so scared of Eddie, anyway? Is he really Mr. Big? We meet him only briefly, but he strikes me as Mr. Medium-Sized Jerk. Jean and Teri should be their own women, and belong to nobody else. ♦
