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Streaming Wars: Love Gets Improvised in “Let Them All Talk”
Streaming Wars: Love Gets Improvised in “Let Them All Talk”,Bennett Campbell Ferguson is WW's assistant arts and culture editor, a Portland-based journalist and film critic. When not writing, he enjoys playing the piano, hiking and reading comic books.

Streaming Wars: Love Gets Improvised in “Let Them All Talk”

SODERBERGH PICK:

As Alice Hughes, a novelist sailing across the Atlantic, Meryl Streep is effortlessly mesmerizing in Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk (2020). Yet she generously shares the screen with Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea, Lady Bird), whose painfully realistic performance as Alice’s nephew Tyler becomes the film’s secret weapon, emotionally speaking.

Tyler joins Alice and her friends Roberta (Candice Bergen) and Susan (Dianne Wiest) on the Queen Mary 2, which is just barely big enough to contain their many grievances. Roberta is furious that Alice used details of her disastrous marriage in a novel, but that’s just one ripple in a whirlpool of jealousy and regret that threatens to engulf the quartet.

None of this is particularly interesting to Tyler, who has a secret mission: spying on Alice for her agent, Karen (Gemma Chan), who’s also aboard the ship. It’s an assignment born of desperation (if Alice doesn’t finish her latest manuscript, Karen’s career is kaput) that leads to adoration.

Like the rest of the cast, Hedges and Chan mostly improvised their dialogue (riffing on a screenplay by Deborah Eisenberg). That might account for the uncanny believability of their relationship, from Tyler’s awkward yearning to Karen’s breezy obliviousness to his feelings. (Case in point: She doesn’t know or doesn’t want to admit that their excursion to a disco club is a date.)

In one scene, Karen weeps over a past relationship while Tyler listens. It’s an exchange far more transactional than their agreement regarding Alice: She revels in his attention, while her willingness to be vulnerable with him makes him feel special. Crudely put, it’s a “friend zone” scene, but that lurid term doesn’t quite fit their relationship or the scrambled social codes that define interactions between men and women.

The end of Tyler and Karen’s relationship is best summed up in her one-word line: “Fuck.” But what makes Let Them All Talk moving is its conviction that connections (romantic or otherwise) always matter, even when they explode and leave ashes of anguish in their wake.

“If you feel attracted to someone from your heart, and you look at them and you feel and you can see their soul, there’s no bad version of that, to want to be a part of that,” Alice tells Tyler. “And we should treasure it. We’re lucky to have that feeling. It’s the greatest; it’s the fullest expression of what it is to be alive.” HBO Max.