Chapter forty-two: Let Them All Talk

Happy Thursday! Though, by the time I publish this, it'll probably be Friday; happy Friday! As of 10:17 pm, I just finished watching this new, hot off the press, film and my thoughts are fresh as can possibly be. I can't wait to share them here. Before I start, I should make note to tell you that this movie, in general, is unlike any other made before. It's a movie that centers around three women in their seventies, which has previously been known to Hollywood as a recipe for disaster when striving to make a good movie. When speaking about being an older woman in Hollywood and the types of roles available to her, Meryl herself has said in a CBS This Morning interview,

"We're either witches, grotesques, or sweet little grandmothers...It's cause we're not fuckable!"

Unfortunately, there is truth to that statement created by the good ole stigma of Hollywood. In any case, that's what makes this movie so unique. The women in it have diverse personality types.

Another thing I should mention is that this movie took place on the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship over the course of just ten days. This all took place before the pandemic, of course, with actual passengers on the cruise serving as film extras, and the director, Steven Soderbergh even did some of the camera work himself. The majority of the dialogue was even improvised! And, the costumes were the real clothing of the actresses. Maybe that's the new era of filmmaking. To quote Meryl yet again,

"It's all in the editing, babe!"

Anyhow, let's get down to it.

Alice Hughes (Meryl) is a writer whose work has earned her The Footling Prize - a prize that is a very distinguished honor, in part because Alice writes fiction, and this award is hardly ever awarded to fictional writers. The ceremony is set to take place in the UK, but she can't fly. So, her agent, Karen (Gemma Chan,) recommends that she travel by ship on The Queen Mary Two. She accepts and brings along her two best friends from college, Susan and Roberta (Diane Wiest and Candice Bergen.) The invitation is rather sudden to the two women who haven't seen each other in decades. Alice's nephew, Tyler (Lucas Hedges,) also accompanies to study the relationships between the three women.

Aboard the cruise, Alice is working on another book, and the demanding process takes her away from her friends. Her best-selling novel, You Always You Never, is one that she disregards; with this new manuscript, she's trying to write her wrongs from that first book. Roberta believes that the main character in You Always, You Never is her and that the story is the reason why she's divorced and working as a lingerie saleswoman; the main character's name is Rowena. It's vitally important to understand this because it's arguably the main point of the film. There's a great divide between the two of them, a divide which Susan tries to close through her poetic words but never truly succeeds.

Alice is very reserved. Her daily schedule is:

• Work on the manuscript.

• Lunch at 1:00.

• Swim at 3:00.

• Work.

• Dinner at 7:00.

• Work in bed.

She doesn't want to give any details regarding the plot of her manuscript, but the rumor is that it's a sequel. Her secretiveness prompts Karen to observe her on the cruise. Karen spends less time doing this and more time with Tyler, but that's not so much of an important detail as much as it is an example of dramatic irony. This is essentially the bulk of the movie. Honestly, it's kind of upsetting that there's such a difference between the women who were once so close.

Some of the paint begins to peel back. Alice has thrown her manuscript into the recycling and deleted the file from her computer. My opinion is that there's a twinge of guilt within her, on Roberta's behalf, that forces her to rewrite. It's agonizing. Her reasoning being,

"It's like polishing the vase when the house is falling down."

Then, after avoiding her for the whole trip, Roberta confronts Alice about the novel and how much it hurt to have a close friend put her life in print for the whole world to see. She leaves Alice with this statement after Alice confronts the fact that they have lost each other,

"Yeah, we did. I loved you when you were Al."

That night, Alice starts rewriting her book but doesn't wake up in the morning to finish it. You heard that right. Sixteen and a half minutes left to go in a two-hour movie, and "they" killed Meryl off, which I was not in the least bit prepared for, and I don't mind saying so. Alice's physician came with her own the trip, as it was apparently risky for her, but she told no one and passed. Later, her friends continue the pilgrimage to her favorite author's, Blodwyn Pugh's grave, but do not go to receive the award. Back in her home, her nephew sits at her desk and peeks around in her bookshelves as Susan and Roberta safeguard her love of literature.

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In my humble and heated opinion, this film could have ended in so many ways lighthearted ways, and because it didn't, nothing was resolved. I know the movie wasn't real, yet it seemed too real; life isn't always picturesque, and this was no fairytale ending. Instead, it was as bitter as it gets. As an aspiring writer myself, I empathize with Alice's struggle to not make her work seem too based on those she is closest to and therefore risk hurting them, as well as her difficulty to maintain a work schedule without it getting in the way of her personal life. Furthermore, I always have thought that when you become a writer one of the hardest things to accept is not being able to know when you'll run out of time to write something. Alice deserved more.

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.