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Movie Review: 'Let Them All Talk' is Meryl Streep's Latest Oscar Contender

Meryl Streep and a brilliant supporting cast 'Let them All Talk' in Soderbergh's HBO Original Movie.

By Sean PatrickPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Steven Soderbergh is one of our great directors. He’s a thoughtful director equally adept at thought provoking drama and suspense as he is at audience pleasing comedy. Soderbergh’s latest movie combines his talent for provoking thought and pleasing audiences. Let them All Talk is an HBO Max original movie starring Meryl Streep as an award winning author gifted a trip to London aboard the Queen Mary 2 who invites her oldest friends to join her.

Dianne Wiest and Candace Bergen play Streep’s closest friends and the dynamic among this trio of legends is wonderfully fraught. Streep plays Alice, Wiest is Susan and Bergen is Roberta and together they went to college and would get together every few years to share memories and friendship, even as Alice became a star as an author. At the time that our story unfolds however, the trio haven’t been together in nearly 30 years.

Roberta is convinced that Alice’s hit novel is based off of her life, including her infidelity and subsequent divorce. She’s agreed to come on this trip because she hopes to extract an apology from Alice. Susan is caught in the middle but remains above it all. She’s on the cruise to get away from home where her son and his wife have moved in and she carries on the stressful work of advocating for death row inmates.

These details are just that, details. Soderbergh doesn’t hammer home these points about these characters, he reveals them. The language of film is used in Let them All Talk to allow these characters to reveal themselves via indirect dialogue, reactions, mannerism, and more. It’s a wonderful example of how to tell a story while respecting the intelligence of the audience. Soderbergh assumes we can pick up the cues in the same way a stranger sitting in on a conversation among old friends would pick up such information.

Lucas Hedges also co-stars in Let Them All Talk as Alice’s nephew, Tyler. Hedges has the most crowd pleasing plot as he carries on a secretive romance with Alice’s literary agent, Karen (Gemma Chan). The two have wonderful chemistry and their scenes together crackle with romantic energy even as most of it may be coming solely from Tyler toward Karen. The relationship is complicated, Karen is older than Tyler and she’s also hiding from Alice and hoping Tyler will update her on the progress of Alice’s new novel.

Now. that plot might sound broad and sitcom-esque in description but even Karen’s hiding out and spying plot doesn’t play out as you expect. It’s layered in on the side of the story, as a way to form a connection between Karen and Tyler and not as the entire basis of their relationship. There are no shenanigans involved, no hijinks. A young man falls for a slightly older woman who happens to be professionally connected to a beloved member of his family. The romance is heady and thrilling until it isn't and all of it is handled with Soderbergh's remarkably light touch.

Soderbergh is tremendous in allowing his characters room to breathe. There are little character scenes sprinkled throughout Let Them All Talk that are delightful in their way. Candace Bergen has a series of these terrific scenes as her Roberta goes trolling desperately for rich men. Roberta’s life has been the toughest among the three as she coped with divorce and the aftermath of Alice’s book that she thoroughly believes is about her and she works a sad little retail job where she is bossed around by a woman a third of her age.

Roberta could be pathetic, and she kind of is pathetic, but Bergen’s performance is filled with pathos and energy. Roberta is angry and desperate but, as played by Candace Bergen she has a human quality rather than a villainous or malicious quality. Roberta has suffered a lifetime of hurt that she blames on Alice and she’s desperate to speak the truth about it but also scared to do it out of a natural anxiety about confrontation and an unacknowledged shame over the fact that she blames someone else for her problems.

Let Them All Talk however, is centered on Meryl Streep and in classic Meryl Streep fashion, the movie carries a moment of transcendent performance. As part of the trip on the famed Queen Mary 2, and so she could bring her friends and nephew along for free, Alice has agreed to give a talk about books on the ship. In her talk, she’s decided that rather than discussing her own work, she wants to highlight the work of an author who moved her.

Streep’s monologue about the transformative power of literature is a gloriously understated moment of grace. Streep is at the absolute height of her powers as we watch her rhapsodize about a mostly unknown author who, despite being dead for 100 years, has transcended time and moved her in unimaginable ways. Literature has that power, the power of a story to transform you and the way you see the world and as Streep, as Alice, proclaims, that's a miraculous thing.

Let Them All Talk is one of the best movies of 2020. It debuts on HBO Max on December 10th.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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