Let Them All Talk (2020)

[Milburn Stone]

We expected to like this Soderbergh film (debuting on HBO Max), which stars Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen, because we like all things Soderbergh. What we didn't expect was to be completely blown away by it. Which we were.

[GHScorpiosRule]

I love Meryl Streep and Candice Bergen.

But watching this was just a slog.

I was expecting better. It was all so disjointed.

[joanne3482]

4 hours ago, GHScorpiosRule said:

I was expecting better. It was all so disjointed.

Same.  It jumped around a lot. I was totally expecting that either Meryl or Candice was going to die at the end, it was that predictable. I wanted to like it because I like all 3 actresses but I just didn't. I think I was expecting it to be more fun that it was. 

[txhorns79]

On 12/14/2020 at 8:22 AM, GHScorpiosRule said:

But watching this was just a slog.

Yeah, it felt like they maybe had 20 minutes of actual story and nothing much else to fill the time.  It really did seem like a waste, given the actors involved. 

[EtheltoTillie]

Geez, it was a new version of My Dinner With Andre. Which I never liked. Too much draggy fake talk. Six degrees of separation includes Wallace Shawn’s partner as writer and Louis Malle’s wife (Bergen) in the cast.    

Edited December 16, 2020 by GussieK

[Simon Boccanegra]

I'll be the one to back up @Milburn Stone, then. I loved this.

I noticed from Rotten Tomatoes that it's one of those cases of an extreme divide between critics and audiences (89 percent approval versus 51 percent, respectively). I'm with the critics this time, but I get it. It's one of those movies I can enjoy every second of, think about for days afterward, look forward to revisiting...and yet very cautiously recommend, and not even talk about with certain friends whose tastes I know.

But it's also one of those cases where if it does reach you, it might really mean something to you.  

I wondered how much of herself the screenwriter, Deborah Eisenberg, who's a highbrow author herself and of Meryl Streep's generation, put into the Streep character. Of course, it's been well publicized that Steven Soderbergh encouraged a great deal of of improvisation, and it shows.

There's that great scene between Lucas Hedges and Dianne Wiest about maintaining friendships and about changes in the world between the time the three leading women were young and Hedges's time. It is difficult for him to imagine how people stayed connected before the internet and social media; it's been his reality for his whole life. She counters that while methods and tools have changed, people really have not. That scene really felt like a documentary conversation between Hedges (b. 1996) and Wiest (b. 1948), and I think that's what it was. I suspect Soderbergh and Eisenberg just gave them a topic and let them go where it took them.

Much of the film is in such a freewheeling conversational vein, although close analysis does reveal a clear structure.  

I couldn't help thinking, while watching, of all the previous associations I have with the three veteran actresses. They are cast to their strengths: Streep the cerebral one, Wiest the nurturing one, and Bergen the firecracker from whom the years have taken the most. I found Bergen very poignant here, but I loved everyone's work, including that of the two younger principals, Hedges and Gemma Chan.  

The main set, the ocean liner, is such a beautiful playground, and Soderbergh has shaped discursive material into a very smooth, well-groomed film. It seems light, loose, and even insubstantial while it's going on, but it is gently probing complicated matters: the connections between family members and friends, the responsibilities of writers to loved ones versus themselves and their audience, the value of art and entertainment, what we leave behind of ourselves when we're gone, how we're likely to be remembered.

It doesn't give us all the things we expect from the setup. It's both less and more than its premise. 

It is a movie I think people will discover or return to over the years, especially as one and eventually all three of these actresses inevitably leave us. It has a lovely autumnal glow.

Edited February 7, 2021 by Simon Boccanegra

[Milburn Stone]

2 hours ago, Simon Boccanegra said:

It seems light, loose, and even insubstantial while it's going on, but it is gently probing complicated matters: the connections between family members and friends, the responsibilities of writers to loved ones versus themselves and their audience, the value of art and entertainment, what we leave behind of ourselves when we're gone, how we're likely to be remembered.

Great analysis, @Simon Boccanegra. And related to the value of art and entertainment (and this may be part of what you mean), we have an examination of the value of art versus entertainment, and an attempt to answer whether there's even a dialectic there at all. I think Soderbergh's answer is that there isn't one. At the beginning, we sort of share Streep's snobbish low estimation of the writer of popular crime fiction, all the while we enjoy Streep as an object of ridicule. We don't like Streep, but in some sense we are Streep, in our shared taxonomy that the Oateses of the world are "better" than the Pattinsons of the world. But then we begin to like the popular writer, and not only that, we begin to realize that he's a damned good writer! Soderbergh has made a popular entertainment that by its existence validates the voyage it takes us on.