• Saltburn

2/10/24 (Sat)

This wild takeoff on The Talented Mr. Ripley is more interested in shocking the audience than offering a coherent story or characters. The film is set in 2006. Oliver, a plain-looking student at Oxford claiming to be from a poor and broken family, gains the friendship of his hunky classmate Felix, who takes pity on him. When Felix learns that Oliver’s father has died, he invites Oliver to his family’s vast country home for the summer. Oliver is welcomed by Felix’s innocently snooty parents and loose sister as well as her eccentric friend. Felix’s bitchy half-black cousin, also a classmate, is sponging off the family and views Oliver, rightly as it turns out, as a potential threat to his privileged position. Oliver’s stay devolves into drunken parties, drugs, sex and several untimely deaths. We realize in the end that Oliver is not what he seems: he is exposed as having a perfectly respectable background, causing Felix to turn against him, and has plotted from the beginning to insinuate himself into Felix’s life and take over the family home and all its wealth. He succeeds through a mix of flattery, physicality and murder.

The details are irrelevant in this case. Writer/director Emerald Fennell is less interested in the psychology behind Oliver’s obsession with Felix than in grossing out the audience: Oliver laps up bath water after Felix has masturbated into it, eats out Felix’s sister during her period, spits on his hand as he prepares to pork the male cousin, and humps Felix’s grave. The final scene, memorable but meaningless, has him doing a triumphant dance buck naked through his newly acquired mansion. As one does. A glimpse emerges of something more interesting when Oliver retorts that he gave the betrayed Felix exactly what he was looking for, i.e., a needy lower-class kid to coddle. I’m not sure that is a bad thing – Felix can’t help being rich, and Oliver can fairly be accused of taking advantage of his friend’s good nature. But Fennell showed little interest in the theme aside from that line, preferring to pile on the exaggerated visuals in the mansion, the grand party, the dinners, the costumes. The movie is slick and visually rich, but the theme was much better explored in Ripley. The murders became a bit much, and surely the director would have done better to keep things ambiguous rather than spell them out so baldly at the end. She needed a good dramaturge. Still, if the film was all surface, it was unapologetically so and gorgeous to look at.

Barry Keoghan, so good as the shy teenager in The Banshees of Inisherin, projects just the right amount of charm and guile as the devious Oliver. The 173cm actor looks like a midget here against his gigantic co-stars (both 196cm), which actually highlights the idea of Felix’s pitying attitude and his cousin’s condescending treatment. He is involved in all the most grotesque scenes, and positively revels in the deliriously energetic nude dance at the end. While no matinee type, he shows that he can carry a film. The more classically handsome Jacob Elordi gave a nicely sympathetic portrait as Felix, Archie Madekwe did a great job as the catty cousin, and Alison Oliver as the sister had the film’s best speech, which she delivered beautifully. But everyone paled before a fantastic Rosamund Pike, who had a ball as the imperious mother. She has the best lines – (reacting to a suicide) “She’d do anything for attention” “I was a lesbian for a while, you know, but it was all a bit too wet for me in the end. Men are so lovely and dry” – and delivered them to perfection. Richard E. Grant (husband), Paul Rhys (butler) and Carey Mulligan (the “poor dear” friend) were also excellent.

The story and characters were not always consistent, and while the dialogue could be witty, the theme got buried in the grotesquerie. Still, for all its flaws, the film was colorful and entertaining. And that counts for something. (But what exactly did the credited Covid advisers do?)