I don’t know why, but unflattering reviews of Saltburn have stirred my ire. Let me say from the outset that Saltburn was a fantastic movie, and I was particularly taken by the performance of Barry Keoghan. Indeed, the only reason I streamed the film is because I noticed that Keoghan was in it, and the only reason I know of the actor is because of his role in The Banshees of Inisherin. Even though he was a supporting actor in the Irish-centric movie, he outshone the main characters. (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson were fine, but nothing in their performances was memorable, given that the movie was literally about two feuding men and fingers in an ass — that’s all you need to know.) Needless to say, Keoghan’s role as Oliver Quick in Saltburn was even more captivating. This guy can f***ing act! I have a relatively simple test for determining the greatest of an actor, and it is this: Do I believe him (in his role)? Has he convinced me (as his character)? Whatever the role — major or minor and beyond the words spoken — this is what I ask myself. Movie critics almost unanimously give Keoghan the praise he’s due despite some who generally panned the movie.
Also, let me say that I’m terrible at watching movies; I rarely see the plot twists coming. Although with Saltburn, I had a sense of what was in store once Oliver started evincing his true nature. But the subtleties that professional movie critics pick up on are usually lost on me. For example, when Oliver throws the mourning stone into the waterway, but it lands on a ledge instead, missing the water, it did not occur to me at the time that Oliver was lying about his father’s death. Maybe I’m just too obtuse to apprehend the foreshadowing, symbolism, and other theatrical storytelling devices in real-time. I like to watch a movie as it’s presented, uncritically, and then I ruminate on its “meaning” to the extent there is such a deeper message afterward. But it would seem that critics are particularly annoyed by the movie’s commentary — or lack thereof — on classism as it keeps coming in review after review. One critic I read was offended — for lack of a better word — that the classism storyline was underdeveloped or muddled. And this is where I start to get aggravated. (One critic said he was bored and confused by the movie. I think that the last thing a critic who pans a movie should do is claim to be confused. Saltburn was not at all a complicated movie to understand. In fact, except for the anticipated plot twist — as every thriller must eventually reveal — the film was rather straightforward in its telling. I could not fault someone for thinking that a movie like Inception as being a bit confusing — another one of my favorite movies — but Saltburn was not an incoherent piece of work. Perhaps critics who are so easily confounded should find another line of work.)
It seems all too often that critics are looking for the writer or director to produce some metaphysical masterpiece or reveal some earth-scattering and, heretofore, never-conceived trenchant secret of human nature. And I’m not sure why a writer or director is expected to create an exhaustive and critical exploration of a topic because it shows up in a movie. In this case, one of the subject matters in Saltburn was the rich “versus” the poor. (I have “versus” in quotes because I’m not convinced the movie should have been interpreted strictly as a competition between the two groups, as classism connotes.) True, a movie’s writer presumably includes dialogue and creates scenes with a specific purpose in mind, but critics often fail in their attempts to extrapolate more meaning than what the writer or director presents on the silver screen. In Saltburn, critics focused too much on the importance of the rich versus the poor storyline. While classism was a significant aspect of the film, it was a backdrop to its primary and more prominent themes: Obsession and desire. The objects of Oliver’s obsession and desire were both Felix and his family’s wealth. To what extent love and money were Oliver’s motivations from the very start of his encounter with Felix, or if they were something that Oliver developed over time, remains unknown. That is to say, was Felix a mark from the start? It is this open question that arguably lends to Saltburn’s mystique. (And unlike the Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn was edgier; Tom was a schoolboy compared to Oliver.) Classism is merely the stage on which the conflict must occur. If Filex and Oliver were both poor or rich, the movie would simply be a flat, obsessive love story turned tragic. A clash of the classes is incidental to the storytelling; it is not the story itself. If it were, I would expect a fuller exploration of the subject by the writer, but it’s not, and critics who think it is are reaching too far for somthing that is not supposed to be there.