I subscribed to HBO Max because it carried two movies that promised – at least to my vulnerable, house-arrested mind – the enticements of travel.
The first, The Flight Attendant, had little travel and a lot that was implausible, beginning with the main character’s behavior. It was a struggle to make it through the first episode.
The second, Let Them All Talk, takes place on a crossing of the Queen Mary 2. As someone who sailed to France in 1975 on the QE2 – taking advantage of a special and short-lived youth fare – I was looking forward to this one. (The shipboard experience was so delightful I sailed home one year later on the Mikhail Lermontov. Those were the days.) Also, it is about a writer (played by Meryl Streep) who invites her two college friends (Dianne Wiest and Candace Bergen) to join her on the voyage.
I thrilled to views of the ship – the galley, the staterooms, the library, even the shot of churned waves outside the window as Wiest and Bergen play Scrabble – and cringed every time that Streep appeared. Her character is everyone’s worst nightmare of the pompous author, and further grates by rarely uttering a sentence without a long pause somewhere in the middle. The acting was good, and the screenplay was interesting, but it portrayed the contemporary crowd on trans-Atlantic crossings – at least to this viewer, who made three of them with dreams of becoming a travel writer – as jaded and grim. Sad to think this may be the movie’s most realistic aspect.
