Post by Dracula on Nov 30, 2023 19:20:02 GMT -5
Saltburn(11/21/2023)
Warning: Review contains some allusions that could be spoilers
2020 was a shitty year for cinema for obvious reasons; the blockbusters all got delayed and so did most of the prestige pieces. However, the movies that did come out ended up having a higher profile than they otherwise might because of the lack of competition and one of the bright spots ended up being the belated release of Emerald Fennell’s darkly comic thriller Promising Young Woman. That was a movie that was supposed to be a theatrical release in the April of that year but got delayed to a Christmas release and given the circumstances most people, myself included, ended up seeing it on (pricy) VOD. It was good for the movie however and made it a serious Oscar player garnering a Best Picture nomination and earning Fennell herself a Best Director nomination and winning her a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Not bad at all for a directorial debut. So all eyes were on what she’d do to follow that up now that she was one of the most promising young directors of the new decade and it was certainly an open question where she’d go from there. I’m sure there were offers made to her to get swallowed up by some franchise or other but instead she’s made another ambitious original dark satire with the modern tale of class warfare entitled Saltburn.
Instead I think this is mostly just supposed to be taken as a dark little character study along the lines of a Nightcrawler that’s done with a lot of style. Barry Keoghan, who’s played both pitiable outcasts in movies like The Banshees of Inisherin as well as menacing obsessives in movies like The Killing of a Sacred Deer, seems like a pretty logical casting choice to play a guy who pretends to be a pitiable outcast only to be revealed as a menacing obsessive and he brings a pretty strong physicality to his performance. Emerald Fennell also makes some pretty bold choices in how she chooses to film the movie; she finds an interesting house to film in, opts for the Academy Ratio, and she and cinematographer Linus Sandgren do some pretty cool things with lighting. The film is also just generally willing to “go places” in Quick’s various schemes and that can be pretty entertainingly daring and it’s pretty fun seeing them find these modern twists on the familiar trappings of this genre. However, it takes a particular kind of person to find the “entertainment” and “fun” in something this dark and I think it will be a bit disorienting to find that that’s the main thing to be gotten from such material rather than some sort of more high minded message about wealth and power, so this is very much a “not for everone” prospect.
**** out of Five
2020 was a shitty year for cinema for obvious reasons; the blockbusters all got delayed and so did most of the prestige pieces. However, the movies that did come out ended up having a higher profile than they otherwise might because of the lack of competition and one of the bright spots ended up being the belated release of Emerald Fennell’s darkly comic thriller Promising Young Woman. That was a movie that was supposed to be a theatrical release in the April of that year but got delayed to a Christmas release and given the circumstances most people, myself included, ended up seeing it on (pricy) VOD. It was good for the movie however and made it a serious Oscar player garnering a Best Picture nomination and earning Fennell herself a Best Director nomination and winning her a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Not bad at all for a directorial debut. So all eyes were on what she’d do to follow that up now that she was one of the most promising young directors of the new decade and it was certainly an open question where she’d go from there. I’m sure there were offers made to her to get swallowed up by some franchise or other but instead she’s made another ambitious original dark satire with the modern tale of class warfare entitled Saltburn.
The film follows Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as he attends his first year at Oxford, which he’s attending on scholarship and quickly finds that he doesn’t fit in with many of the other pupils. He does, however, come to find he has a bit of an “in” with a popular student named Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) after he helps him with a flat tire on his bike. Getting along with Catton is not always the easiest as the extremely wealthy Catton has certain privilege blind spots but after Catton learns that Quick can’t go home for the summer because of the death of his father and his mother’s addiction problems he invites Quick to join him at his family estate, Saltburn, for the summer. There Quick soon meets Catton’s eccentric father Sir James Catton (Richard E. Grant), even more eccentric mother Lady Elsbeth Catton (Rosamund Pike), his troubled sister Venetia Catton (Alison Oliver), and some of his other visiting friends like Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe) and Pamela (Carey Mulligan). Fitting in at this place is a challenge for Quick but he starts to get the hang of it and it isn’t always entirely clear what his intentions are with these people as he’s plainly jealous of all of them and is a bit of a schemer but it’s not entirely clear just how far he’s willing to take his ambitions.
The inspirations for Saltburn are not hard to identify. The “country manor class warfare” story is basically a whole genre of fiction in British literature and film which this if riffing on but this one brings the genre into the modern day. The film is set around 2006 and 2007 and looks at a British old money gentry who conduct a lot of anachronistic rituals like “dressing for dinner” but who at the same time have a very different set of manners and mores and seem accepting of things like profanity, premarital sex, and homosexuality which would have been “scandalous” during the time we normally associate with stories of these houses. The film also liberally borrows from stuff like The Servant and Kind Hearts and Coronets, but the clearest of all the film’s inspiration is Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and its various film adaptations. Like that, this is the story of a weird and socially awkward guy who becomes jealously fixated on a wealthier and more popular guy and uses this obsession to sort of infiltrate his life and after pulling off an unlikely friendship starts scheming against him. So this is very much a movie about a character who’s pretty much a sociopath and the film is pretty upfront about this though as it goes on the sheer depth of it becomes more and more apparent.
That Oliver Quick turns out to be a scheming, self-interested, and generally unsympathetic bourgeois rather than an oppressed person fighting for justice acts as something of a subversion of the class politics that you might expect from a story like this. This guy doesn’t “eat the rich” because he’s hungry, he “eats them” because he’s a glutton. The film isn’t exactly sympathetic to the rich people in this, who are often condescending micro-aggressors who are sometimes wield their privilege in pushy ways, but we don’t get any specific indication that this family earned their money in any manifestly unjust way and they don’t seem superfluously harmful to Quick or anyone else and just generally aren’t built up to be deserving of everything that gets done to them over the course of the film. This approach may well ruffle some feathers, especially if one chooses to look at this as a sort of allegory for wider real world class struggle, which would kind of seem to position the wealthy as out of touch but still unfairly besieged by a jealous middle class who resents them for not terribly logical reasons. I don’t think that’s really what Fennell is trying to say though as I’m not sure this is meant to be looked at in such an allegorical way.
**** out of Five
