‘Let Them All Talk’: A supposedly fun thing that’ll keep you diverted until the unpacking
By Tom MeekThursday, December 10, 2020
I’ve never been on a cruise ship. I’ve marveled at the behemoths sailing into the Black Falcon Terminal in the Seaport, I’ve drunk in many moments of deck-perched merriment on friends’ social media posts, read David Foster Wallace’s semi-famous essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and enjoyed those peculiar and perplexing murder mysteries at sea that crop up on true crime investigative shows now and then – but I have yet to be part of a floating colony. In my heart, I feel I mostly align with Mr. Wallace, remaining tepidly cruise curious. Thanks to “Let Them All Talk,” the latest from Steven Soderbergh, cinema’s official auteur of quirky cool, my wan curiosity has received a reinvigorating shot.
Soderbergh, the man who made the “Ocean’s Eleven” films as well as such experimental fare as “Unsane” (2018) and “Bubble” (2005), slides toward more the latter here. He gets Meryl Streep aboard the Queen Mary 2 luxury liner en route to London as Alice, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who can’t fly – Alice is a solemn sort, set in her ways, and won’t take the cruise unless her publishers give her top accommodations. Her besties from college, Susan (Dianne Wiest) and Roberta (Candice Bergen), get to tag along, as well as her nephew, Tyler (Lucas Hedges, who in “French Exit” opening later this year, again crosses the Atlantic; it’s by different means but with an equally complicated and mature woman of stature). The film, an improvisational bit formed from a short story by writer Deborah Eisenberg, has its moments: Roberta refuses to do any one-on-one time with Alice; there’s a strange man coming out of Alice’s cabin each morning; and adding to the mix is Karen (Gemma Chan, who provided a graceful, stately presence in the otherwise riotous rom-com “Crazy Rich Asians”), who’s from the publishing house and wants to educe another prize winner from Alice. Overall it’s choppy seas, though, lacking earnest, emotional cohesion. Sure, there’s a lot of suppressed emotion seeping through strong performances, but the material and devices never quite seem to warrant the requisite outpouring. It feels like a Robert Altman movie without a maestro of mass mania to wave the baton
Though everything is tied together with twists and revelations, back on firm ground one might wonder if the journey was worth the trip. From what’s onscreen you can imagine Soderbergh and his cast had a rollicking good time making the film, and the boat they chose was not a floating family theme park, but one with stately dining rooms and libraries with dark wood carousels overlooking scenic vistas of the ocean. That’s my cruise. Will I ever take it?
Besides being set in a harsh future where the threads of humanity claw and scrape to hang on, the two films boast multiple Toms. In “Oblivion” his Jack Harper is one of two human agents on a toxic Earth running seawater siphons to feed the rest of humanity on a housing platform in the near atmosphere (there’s more to it than that, and it’s a worthy watch) before coming shockingly face to face with another Jack Harper. In “Tomorrow,” Cruise is Major Cage, a cocksure military PR man who gets placed frontline in the battle against an invading alien species sweeping through Europe and poised to eradicate all of mankind – and he can rise from the dead. Cage can’t stomach the sight of blood and has never seen combat, but he gets demoted to private and injected into a troop of misfits as presumed fodder for the invading Mimics, which look like giant angry dust bunnies with metallic tentacles and a lion-like mug, when they take the beaches of Normandy. That presumption proves correct – initially – but after Cage gets laid to waste by an angry Alpha Mimic, he’s somehow imbued with the ability to pop back to life 24 hours before his expiration, or something like that. 
For What it's Worth 