Yes, I Will Defend the Politics of Saltburn !

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Hello, future biopic subjects,

Esther, you’ve stopped me in my tracks with the question of who should direct the movie version of my life. Is it Christopher Nolan, so that money would be no object? Sofia Coppola, to up the chance that I’d live in a palace or at least a mansion? Zack Snyder, so that just as the closing credits are about to roll, I could lobby for a much longer cut? Probably none of the above. Why kid myself? I’m a writer sitting at home in jeans and a shamefully filthy hoodie, within arm’s reach of a bowl of cereal, having a virtual conversation with three other writers while intermittently staring out the window wondering what sadist decided the sun should set at 4:30 p.m. This gig has Charlie Kaufman’s name all over it.

As for what movies spoke most to my current mood, I admit that it’s not a way in which I’m used to thinking about movies—I’m usually more interested in getting pulled into the filmmaker’s mood than in having my own mirrored back to me—but it’s a totally valid question, and it’s made me realize that as we tick into a presidential election year, my mood is very much “Dear God, I hope people will not let their desire for the perfect be the enemy of the good (or the friend of the rock-bottom evil).” Perhaps that’s why this year, I found myself in sympathy with the imperfections of movies I pretty much loved. I felt myself more than usually willing to accept jarring notes, problematic-adjacent moments, rough patches on otherwise smooth surfaces; I was willing to go where a good driver drove me. The weird, unnerving sex in Oppenheimer—those scenes that seemed to make some younger people go clammy and turn to one another and say, “Cringe!” and “wyd, Chris Nolan”? I’m fine with them—Chris, you do you! The toy-sales leitmotif of Barbie, Wonka, and, while we’re on the subject, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem? I’m willing to compromise! Mark Ruffalo’s accent in Poor Things? Whatever! A more technically perfect performance might have been a less hilarious one.

The politics of Saltburn? [Deep breath] OK, here we go …

Things have been so congenial among us up to now that I feel slightly afraid to ruin the vibe by telling all of you that I adored Emerald Fennell’s lump-of-coal-where-its-heart-should-be dark satire. I have been surprised to see some people take the movie to task essentially for being an insufficient ally in the Great Class Struggle. The argument, as I understand it, is that in a story pitting a slightly awkward middle-class striver (Barry Keoghan, that extraordinary maker of bold choices who has, in the past year, broken through the way Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman seemed to 50 years ago) against a toxic scion of British ultra-aristocracy (Jacob Elordi) and his rich-beyond-measure, one-step-from-inbred family, it should be fairly clear who the good guys and bad guys are. But in Saltburn, it isn’t, and that’s a great part of the fun.

There is, I’ll concede, something politically impish in Saltburn—at times, it seems to be saying to earnest armchair revolutionaries, “See? This is what ‘Eat the Rich’ actually looks like!” But I don’t think Fennell’s interest in the story is primarily political at all. As a writer, she’s a very shrewd scavenger, and in Saltburn, she has drawn explicitly from the first third of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, the greatest vacationing-at-a-rich-college-friend’s-home story of all time, and, relatedly, a masterwork of repressed homoeroticism; from its famously luxe 1981 miniseries adaptation (it streams on Amazon and elsewhere; give yourselves a 12-hour present and dive in); from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley; and from the 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which the only thing that stands between Dennis Price and the inheritance of a vast fortune is a great number of inconveniently alive people, all played by Alec Guinness.* The story she comes up with is discomforting, I think, but also ferociously confident. It’s also so mean! Look, there’s never a shortage of movies about good, imperfect, honorable people trying hard to do the right thing—perhaps you’ve heard of the Sundance Film Festival—and the finest of them are extraordinary. (For me, probably the best this year was Celine Song’s gentle and exquisite Past Lives, a love triangle with nobody to root against.) But every salad needs a splash of vinegar—or in Saltburn’s case, battery acid. And all of us, especially people like me who are fond of telling other people that they shouldn’t be afraid of movies that make them squeamish, could probably stand to embrace our own uneasiness as well.

Sam, your ode to Ira Sachs’ wonderful Passages made me think about what a sharply-above-average year this has been for queerness in movies—specifically for complex, messy, imperfect, non-role-model LGBTQ+ characters (or, sometimes, as with Rogowski’s in Passages, just plain assholes). I’m thinking of the sullen, scheming baby lesbians played by Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri in the neo-Heathers teen comedy Bottoms; of the middle-aged gay writer Adam (Andrew Scott), struggling with an empty apartment building, an empty refrigerator, an empty laptop screen, and a heart full of sorrow in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers; and of (not a movie, but I’m giving them an honorary one-sentence pass into this discussion) Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett in The Last of Us, playing the most moving long-term gay couple since John Lithgow and Alfred Molina in Sachs’ superb 2014 comedy-drama Love Is Strange.

On Netflix alone this year, we had Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (whatever your issues may be with the movie, you can’t accuse it of dodging Bernstein’s homosexuality and how it affected his marriage, as some feared it would); a breakthrough performance of great warmth and power by Colman Domingo in George C. Wolfe’s Rustin; and Annette Bening and Jodie Foster in Nyad, wholeheartedly exploring a bumpy and imbalanced middle-aged lesbian friendship. I found it a particular delight to watch Foster, the most alpha of actresses, transform herself into a perpetually jangled beta lesbian and give herself over completely to the narrative’s Peppermint Patty–and–Marcie dynamic. Movie journalism tends to have villain companies and hero companies, and Netflix, a big-box store where many would prefer a boutique, is often on the naughty list, but come on, that’s impressive: If A24 had given us that lineup in one year, it’d be getting the GLAAD Nobel Prize. And I didn’t even mention Netflix’s May December, a straight movie steeped in queer sensibility, but that’s only because it was much too important a part of my movie year to leave for the end of an entry. Sam, how dare you, I am not a coward, I and my alphabetical Top 10 list resent that! But if you want ranking, I’ll give you a ranking: May December is my No. 1.

Off to wash that hoodie,

Mark

Read the next entry in Movie Club: Emma Stone Has Never Been Funnier (or Sexier) Than In Poor Things