Let Them All Talk (2020)

I have a history of watching films superficially similar to Let Them All Talk. I outright rented Poms (2019); I had a theater to myself for a screening of Book Club (2018). I have no idea why—although I might speculate around a fondness for the Grumpy Old Men franchise—but that history certainly informed my choice to seek out Let Them All Talk, the Steven Soderbergh-directed cruise movie released during the pandemic. Whereas I think of this as Diane Keaton’s genre, the presence of Meryl Streep (as well as Soderbergh behind the camera) piqued my interest. What would these Hollywood heavyweights bring to this gentle but predictable genre?

For most of the film, the answer was a fresh perspective, with rich relationship dynamics, an endearing-if-silly espionage plot line, and both the ancillary characters and sufficient intrigue to keep me engaged even while cleaning up a small cup of Greek yogurt that fell three feet from my unreliable hands and somehow splashed all the way to the ceiling. I thought that I had stumbled onto an “old ladies movie” gem and I eagerly waited to find out where it would go. 

This was a mistake. 

Because it went precisely where all the others do. 

Alice (Streep) is a celebrated New York City author with a dilemma: she has received a prestigious British literary prize but can’t fly. Her new agent, Karen (Gemma Chan), suggests she take a cruise on the Queen Mary 2 and Alice accepts on the condition of bringing a trio of guests. Two are her estranged friends from college: Susan (Dianne Wiest), a lawyer who comes with an optimistic outlook, and Roberta (Candice Bergen), a retail saleswoman who holds a grudge and plans to confront Alice over a particular grievance. Also tagging along is Alice’s nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges) who lends a hand as his favorite aunt’s pseudo-assistant. 

The majestic boat—it is effectively a horizontal hotel floating in the Atlantic—makes for a grand setting for reconnection…but Alice has other plans. Informing her guests that she plans to work on her new manuscript the whole time, she’ll see them at dinners. Probably. This complicates things: Roberta stews and begins aggressive flirting while waiting to pounce, Susan shrugs and tries to enjoy her escape, and Tyler gets roped into a plot by Karen to unearth dirt about Alice’s manuscript to report back to her publishing house. The ship is gargantuan but far from infinite; these issues, among others, will all come to a head. 

Those pieces all combine to generate far more drama than I initially inspected. Roberta’s bitter fury crackles; what revelations will the inevitable confrontation unearth? Tyler and the much-older Karen have a warm chemistry; where will their relationship go? Susan and Karen both hit it off with thriller writer Kelvin (Dan Algrant); how will that play out and impact the aloof and pretentious Alice? And why in the world did Alice orchestrate this entire trip? 

That last question is key but also where Let Them All Talk goes awry. The answer is…well? It’s probably one thing but it plays out as another thing and that other thing is so conventional that it sucks all the air out of the film’s ending. This fresh take on familiar fare suddenly turns into familiar fare. For such a simple premise, this had a swearing, yogurt-cleaning me genuinely intrigued, but then seemed to dip its script into a bowl of cliches to clean up all of the glorious messiness it had set up. 

And those cliches rendered the film instantaneously inert. At one point during the final scenes, characters sit down and debate what they should next do. The question couldn’t help but sound meta-textual even though it was rhetorical: now you do what the characters do in every one of these movies. 

What’s the penalty for a film like Let Them All Talk that squanders everything in the last fifteen minutes? I really enjoyed the setting on the massive cruise liner, Streep was solid as the enigmatic Alice who can’t face her friends but wants them nearby, and I grinned many times throughout the dalliances between Hedges’ and Chan’s characters. I don’t dislike this genre that, even when it condescends, leaves me with a bit more perspective on the privilege of relative youth. But the ending undoes my good cheer and my willingness to laud this as something greater than its genre’s middling staples. 

This a good movie, except for the parts that are trite and terrible. This is a bad movie, except for the parts that feel fresh and populated by characters with depth interacting in an immaculate setting. I wouldn’t have thought this film would land here in such a mediocre place, but I guess I didn’t thing yogurt from a small cup could leap ten vertical feet either.

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