BEFORE: All right, ten days until Easter, I've got to fill that space somehow. Hey, what about this film that I could have worked in back in January, between two other films with Carey Mulligan, only I didn't really have the bandwidth for it? It was a last-minute possible addition because it had just popped up on AmazonPrime, and I had worked a screening of it in the theater, back in December, with Rosamund Pike speaking on a panel afterwards. I peeked in on the screening a couple times, and what I saw was very confusing, which happens - like that screening of "Nope" where I walked in at the WORST possible time and couldn't make sense out of what I saw.
They hit the circuit HARD with this one in November and December, a lot of guild screenings, a lot of live panels with Pike and Barry Keoghan, plus the director, who won an Oscar for writing "Promising Young Woman" and will probably be the first person to tell everyone about that, everywhere she goes, I'm guessing. But hey, that's how the game is played. Still, "Saltburn" failed to get any Oscar nominations, which is why I'm very suspicious of it.
Barry Keoghan carries over from "The Banshees of Inisherin". And now I really need this film to help connect St. Patrick's Day and Easter, so it was a really good move to NOT watch it in January - see, the chain knows and everything kind of has a funny way of working out.
THE PLOT: A student at Oxtord University finds himself drawn into the world of a charming and aristocratic classmate, who invites him to his eccentric family's sprawling estate for a summer never to be forgotten.
AFTER: Ugh, this was for sure a challenging film for me, and not just because the captions wouldn't work on Amazon Prime for some reason, so I had to keep the volume up loud enough for me to hear everything, but not loud enough to wake up my wife upstairs (a delicate balance at times, since the film would often cut right into a party scene with loud music playing). Even then, I had difficulty with the accents of several characters, so for long stretches of the film I had no idea what people were saying, because British people talk funny, and it's all based on region, like the Liverpool people talk funny in a different way from the Londoners, and then my brain can't really catch on to ONE accent and compensate, like it did for "The Banshees of Inisherin". Man, I really need those captions - can somebody fix this please?
The other problem is that they cast Barry Keoghan as a young college student for the flashback scenes set in 2006 - he's fine in the present day scenes, but come on, he's like 37 years old, and I'm supposed to take him seriously as a college freshman at Oxford? That's really just one year older than a high-school student, so he was wearing so much make-up that at times it looked like his face was melting, and he already kind of looks like that anyway. Yeah, I get that he often plays characters with complicated situations and loose morals, but does he have to keep making THAT face? Or does he just look like that all the time? That schtick of using a sad, confused puppy-dog look of a mentally impaired person is going to wear itself very thin at some point, I'd argue that it has already.
Look, I get that there are new rules for the millennials, and where romance goes for the millennials and Gen Z, it's all very complicated. And films should reflect that too, I'm all for complicated love triangles and quadrangles with same-sex yearnings, from a narrative point of view there are new opportunities and barriers to break and thresholds to be crossed, but there's no reason to be gross about it. When Oliver gets invited to Saltburn, the home of the Catton family, it's clear that he's obsessed with his male classmate, Felix. But when he gets there it's a long time before he makes any move on Felix, instead he makes out with Felix's sister, Venetia. Then later he blackmails Felix's American cousin, Farleigh, into a sexual relationship. Great, he's an equal opportunity creepo. But I didn't find this entertaining at all, because every aspect of it was unsettling - was that the point?
Oliver's always hanging around, circling Felix and watching him (and also...WATCHING him, if you get my drift). Drinking Felix's bathwater is just gross, though, and the film can't help but returning to this gross bodily-fluid stuff that I don't think anybody is doing IRL, not even the Gen Z kids. I'm reminded of "Call Me By Your Name", the stuff with the peaches, which I'm pretty sure wasn't even a thing, and the things here I'm hoping aren't things either, they only happen in the movies. RIght? Here's hoping. All througout this film, I was thinking, "Why do you all have to be so gross?" What's wrong with karaoke parties and elegant dinners and watching "Superbad" together and OK, maybe doing some drugs here and there, that's all part of the fun that rich people have. Whatever happened to the good old days when if you wanted to have some nasty little sexual fun you might suck on somebody's toes, assuming you knew they were clean, because otherwise ewwww.
My point is that you're not going to excite Academy members with gross sex stuff, remember that most of them are older and some are retired, so they have plenty of time to watch free movies all day and go to guild screenings and they have time to fill out their ballots, while the younger members are working on film sets and honestly don't have time to see a lot of movies or even cast their ballots. Maybe this is why a movie about the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II won Best Picture, and a movie about a creepy old-looking kid having gross sexual encounters with various members of an upper-class UK family didn't even get a nomination. Just saying. They're working on making the Academy membership more diverse but I'm guessing that's a long, slow process and won't really show gains until more of the older members age out of the program. I'm guessing the older voters didn't really "get" this film, or walked out in disgust. (see also: "Babylon"...)
Anyway, it's off the list now, and I can work on getting to "Oppenheimer", which I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy more, since I'm usually fascinated by the films of Christopher Nolan. If "Saltburn" is indicative of the new wave of filmmaking, I'm not really there for it, which makes sense because I'm probably just too old for this movie myself in the end. Yeah, it's all about the real estate, I get that, but why not get a job and a mortgage like everybody else if you want to own property, honestly that seems a lot easier in the end, it just takes time and the newer generation apparently doesn't want to wait that long for it.
Also starring Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike (last seen in "Radioactive"), Richard E. Grant (last seen in "Dom Hemingway"), Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe (last seen in "Voyagers"), Carey Mulligan (last seen in "She Said"), Paul Rhys (last seen in "Lionheart"), Ewan Mitchell, Sadie Soverall, Millie Kent, Reece Shearsmith (last seen in "See How They Run"), Dorothy Atkinson (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Shaun Dooley (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Lolly Adefope (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Joshua McGuire (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Richie Cotterell, Will Gibson, Tasha Lim, Aleah Aberdeen, Matt Carver (last seen in "The Little Mermaid" (2023)), Saga Spjuth-Sail, Joshua Samuels, Julian Lloyd Patton, Tomas Barry, Andy Brady, Michelle Thomas with archive footage of Michael Cera (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Jonah Hill (last seen in "You People"), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (last seen in "Promising Young Woman").
RATING: 3 out of 10 books on the summer reading list
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