Let Them All Talk

Steven Soderbergh's Let Them All Talk, an HBO film that premiered in 2020, is a slight dramedy that centers on three women of a certain age taking a transatlantic voyage on a cruise ship. Meryl Streep portrays Alice, a literary lioness who is making the trip to receive an award in London and make amends to her two college chums. Alice's beloved and feckless nephew, played by Lucas Hedges, accompanies them and falls for Alice's literary agent in an all too familiar narrative arc.

However, the very familiarity of Let Them All Talk is part of its charm. The primary appeal of the film is watching La Streep, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen interact, kvetch, and dish. Hedges, the most passive of current leading men, has little to do but genuflect to his elders. The roles Streep and Wiest play are so closely aligned with their screen image (flinty and flighty, respectively) that they are able to inhabit their roles effortlessly. Streep, never one of my favorites, nails her character's intelligence and pomposity.

Ms. Bergen's Roberta is the most aggrieved and desperate of the three characters and the actress called upon by Soderbergh and screenwriter Deborah Eisenberg to do the most heavy lifting. Bergen's early woodenness as an actress led to some comparisons of her with Charlie McCarthy, her ventriloquist father's dummy. The comparisons were cruel but not inapt. She started to emerge from her cocoon in 1979's Starting Over with a comic turn that bordered on self-flagellation. It was with George Cukor's Rich and Famous, in 1981, that she found her groove, culminating on television with the brassy Murphy Brown. 

In Let Them All Talk, Bergen plays a faded magnolia reduced to working as a brassiere fitter in a department store. She makes her character's crassness and anguish tangible. Soderbergh, one of our directors most attuned to the humiliations of the workplace, succinctly depicts her plight, but, unlike Alan J. Pakula in Starting Over, does not allow her desperation to verge on self-parody. Throughout the film, there are documentary like asides that focus on the behind the scenes work being done on the ship. Another example of Soderbergh's career long adherence to formal realism.

Let Them All Talk employed, reportedly, a great deal of improvisation on set. However, Ms. Eisenberg's script employs a strong sense of structure that gives the film the strengths, and weaknesses, of a New Yorker short story. The film has a good deal of Apollonian architecture, but no sense of Dionysian rage. It is tidily structured, but bloodless. There is much nice work, but nice is a limiting adjective. Thomas Newman's big band score is tunefully appropriate and I enjoyed Daniel Algrant's turn as a writer of popular mysteries. Mr. Algrant's work as a director has been unfortunately limited and has not received appropriate appreciation. I particularly commend to the reader his Naked in New York. All in all, Let Them All Talk skims the surface swimmingly, but fails to plumb any real depths.