Let Them All Talk (2020)
(On Cable TV, December 2020) How did Let Them All Talk go so wrong? It has a genius-level director, an impeccable cast (even just with Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest), the backdrop of an ocean liner, a writer-as-protagonist, the always-cute Gemma Chan, and yet it all falls flat. One of my favourite settings in fiction is the ocean liner – a vast but enclosed space in which dramas can play out on a very romantic stage. But director Steven Soderbergh somehow manages to make it all look and feel so banal. The dialogue is trite and uninteresting, the characters are bland and over-privileged (Oh, no, you based your book on my life and my life is now ruined – get a grip over yourself) and the directing is both flat and unremarkable. Really, it’s as if Soderbergh went on an all-destroying mission to leech away all energy from what he had at his disposal. Part of it can be explained by the film’s production, heavy on naturalistic light and staging, as well (more crucially) on rambling improvised dialogue. But that’s the price to pay for Soderbergh’s unquenchable thirst for experimentation: Sometimes, you get a masterpiece, and other times, you get the antithesis of that. At least there’s Chan to make it slightly better.