“Oh god there must be a better way–there must be a better way to describe things, to arrange words, a new way to use words to take you to a place beyond words. There must be.” This is the internal monologue of author Alice Hughes when we’re first introduced to her (sounding, to be honest, not unlike Nicolas Cage playing Charlie Kaufman). For she is not “just a writer,” but an author. This is the noun that describes the sort of people who win awards and prizes for their writing. She is made to come across like a Doris Lessing sort of figure–or maybe that’s too grand a comparison. But, at the bare minimum, she seems at least to be as much of a respected literary icon as Nora Ephron, who, fittingly, was known for the aphorism, “Everything is copy.” Hughes feels the same way, it would appear, based on her most famous book (complete with Ephron-y title): You Always, You Never. Centered on a character named Rowena that we learn is based on her longtime friend, Roberta (Candice Bergen), this is the book her publisher is most eager to see her revisit in the form of a sequel for her latest manuscript.
“The publisher’s” interests, of course, are represented by an agent. And though Alice’s usual one, Sophie, has moved on, she has left behind in her stead, Karen (Gemma Chan)–yes, the name is apparently palatable if it’s not a white woman who bears it. Before we see Alice sitting down to an awkward lunch with her new agent, the title card Let Them All Talk is given the subtitle “a.k.a. The Fall of 2019”–and in some odd way, for most of us, that feels like the last time anything was normal happened before the world ended (the real 2012, if you will). It was even a time when publishing houses still had a budget to make it somewhat credible that they would foot the bill for one of their “star” authors to not only ride on a luxury ocean liner, but for two of her friends and a nephew as well. In addition to Roberta, who now works in a lingerie department in Dallas, one of those friends is Susan (Dianne Wiest), who lives in Seattle and works as a defense attorney. And then there’s Tyler (Lucas Hedges, who looks vaguely like a poor man’s Jesse Eisenberg–incidentally, the screenplay for this movie was written by Deborah Eisenberg). Alice’s nephew who lives in Cleveland. While we’re not yet privy to why she favors him so much, it’s clear that she came to his rescue as one of the only family members not known for her ill repute. What’s also clear is that there must be a very specific reason for why Alice would choose these people in her life (or rather, no longer really directly in her life) to accompany her.
Karen, meanwhile, is too anxiety-ridden to let Alice “jet” (boat?) off to England to collect the Footling Prize (a fictionally named award that just goes to show how little people appreciate writing when the word “foot” gets inserted into one of their prizes). So she, in Lucy Ricardo fashion, hatches a harebrained scheme to get her own room aboard the ship, using Tyler as an ear and mouthpiece into the mindset of Alice as she works on finishing the manuscript. All she’ll give him as a description is that “it’s about trying to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time.” That gives Karen the glimmer of hope to believe it could be a sequel to You Always, You Never. One can imagine the likes of Doris Lessing feeling irritated that her most admired work is The Golden Notebook when she would have perhaps preferred a lesser known work to be paid attention to. For Alice, that lesser known work is A Function of the Body, which she seems to expressly mention often as a better alternative to You Always, You Never.
It is, however, this latter “early career” novel that seems to have found Alice at her least pompous. In the present, Roberta and Susan can’t help but remark, “Did she always talk like that?” The answer, they decide, is definitely not. While giving a speech about Blodwyn Pugh’s Realm of the Owl (the sort of book that no mass audience can stomach), Alice does, indeed, come across as a major blowhard. Often, it seems, Streep is doing what she can to emulate her Susan Orlean vibe in Adaptation. Or maybe she just views all successful (by the shitty societal standards presented) writers as inherently self-involved and oblivious to anything or anyone that isn’t useful for a story. Which, often, is how they became successful in the first place.
The true “blockbuster writer” of the ship though is Kelvin Kranz (Daniel Algrant), a thriller novelist (seemingly modeled after Stephen King meets James Patterson) who has no shortage of books available on the ship’s library. Especially compared to Alice’s canon. Alice, naturally, is affronted by someone like him being so lauded, but can’t help coming around to his gentlemanly personality after he asks her a question during her talk (one planted in his ear by Karen).
Whether because Eisenberg is a short story writer not prone to creating so much dialogue or because the cast was too good to pass up the opportunity, the overt use of improv throughout the narrative is steered by the deft direction of Steven Soderbergh, who once famously declared he was retiring from directing movies (which stuck for about all of about four years when he came out with 2017’s Logan Lucky). Mercifully, he decided to show up again when streaming services like HBO Max seemed to give him the creative freedom he was seeking (at least for now). In any case, it is the improv that steers a certain thematic thread throughout the film, this recurring idea of how Alice and her friends’ are among the last generation to really know what “pure humanity” was like (e.g. not communicating primarily by and through screens). Tyler brings this up when asking Susan about living in a time before computers and smartphones. Susan brings it up in talking about how Elon Musk has put machines into the sky that look like stars so that people can no longer tell the difference between the real and the fake.
Yet through this divide, it is writing, even still–and perhaps writing alone–that can reach out through time from one generation and into another. No matter how much technology perverts it–then again, if the machines start doing all the writing (as is ultimately expected), it’s doubtful that anything truly “human” will be able to traverse through the decades and centuries ever again. But before that happens, Alice has Pugh. The writer who spoke to her from her own time and echoed through this one. So it is that she states in her speech to the ship, “What a miracle it is that Blodwyn Pugh–her thoughts and experiences–that they could reach across time and reach into my consciousness.” A foreshadowing sentiment indeed. And one that speaks to the value of writing–not to mention why some (very few, mind you) writers still risk telling the truth based on the people they know, risking total alienation, for the sake of getting a message through that is real. It’s certainly what Truman Capote did with In Cold Blood (selling Perry down the river after getting close to him) and, later, Answered Prayers (going for the jugular of every socialite he’d ever met). Though Alice likely does not favor Capote’s work. What’s more, the main objective now for Alice at the end of the “crossing” is wanting to visit Pugh’s grave with her friends and nephew at a convent in Cardiff.
What she hadn’t accounted for, alas, was Roberta’s growing resentment, not just throughout their decades-long separation, but while on the ship as Alice makes a big to-do about only being able to meet up with them for dinner as she’ll be working. Roberta, in response, insists on meeting for tea one afternoon, only to blow her off in favor of continuing a flirtation with a man who will never amount to what she needs. And what she needs–as she’s made perfectly clear–is money. After all, it was Alice’s precious book, You Always, You Never, that ended up costing Roberta her cush marriage to a man who “took care of her” (financially, duh). All because Alice ripped the lid off of an affair Roberta had with a mechanic. The sordid stuff of 70s and 80s soap operas that also made You Always, You Never so adaptable for the screen.
Occasionally vacillating between vindictiveness and forgiveness (though mostly sticking to the former), at one point Roberta tells Susan, “If you can’t keep a secret yourself, you can’t ask anyone else to keep a secret.” Least of all a fucking writer, who will try to spill as many as they can in print before they go to their grave. It’s at that point when everyone is suddenly grateful to them for their “words of truth”–because it means they can get most of the royalties now instead. Or at least the rights in order to adapt the work into something for TV (for, as is well-known, ain’t nobody fuckin’ readin’).
