*/****
starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant
written and directed by Emerald Fennell
by Walter Chaw People keep expressing in the weariest, archest way how disappointing Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) has turned out to be, or, if they’re more passive, how they do hope he doesn’t end up like the last one–you know, that one; why do they all end up that way? Well, who wouldn’t snap under that kind of aristocratic disapproval, I ask you? It’s like if Jay Sherman’s butler caught you nicking from the buffet table. And indeed, all of Emerald Fennell’s insufferable Saltburn is like The Talented Mr. Ripley written by Fleabag–if Patricia Highsmith and Phoebe Waller-Bridge were trying to follow up an underbaked piece of shit with another underbaked piece of shit while producers were still bedazzled by her empty, shit-eating bullshit. Sorry, I mean to say Saltburn is hackwork that doesn’t know what it’s trying to say because Emerald Fennell, a member herself of the larded gentry, isn’t remotely self-aware enough to recognize the extent to which she’s completely bought into her systemic privilege and its attendant noblesse oblige. Yes, good Queen Emerald has a story to tell about how bad her people are. Now listen up, peon.
Oliver is a scholarship student at Oxford who actually read the entire summer-reading list in order to achieve a level playing ground with all the legacy twats like Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) and Felix (Jacob Elordi). The only friend he manages to make is psychotically autistic Michael (Ewan Mitchell)–but fear not, Saltburn forgets about him as soon as he threatens to become a human being: a fate the rest of the characters luckily never come close to suffering. Count Michael as the first example of how Oxford is for the rich and beautiful, not the slightly less rich and hard-working or gifted. Should someone have put a hand on Fennell’s arm here and asked whether that’s really the point she’s trying to make? “Hey, Emerald, when you’re reading the Ripley series, do you think that Ripley is the good guy or… What is it you’re taking away from this?” The year that Parasite premiered at Telluride, I had more than one interaction with the fabulously wealthy people who can afford to attend Telluride about how they thought the parasites of the film were the poor people. Saltburn is the movie one of those people would have made–did make. Let’s face it, but for the grace of one movie about rape that scolds the rapists ineffectually while relying on the cops to be the heroes, (Oscar-winner!) Fennell would be an audience member and not an honoured guest who told a captive audience at the premiere of this one how important this film was. It is, but not for the reasons she thinks it is.
No, Saltburn is important not for what it says about the rich, but for how it is an example of how the rich see themselves: as victims, mainly, of opportunistic predators from the lower classes who would seek to insinuate themselves into their good graces. They’ll do this, the Oliver Twists–er, Quicks–of the world, by displaying uncommonly good manners and ingratiating interest in their repressed emotional lives and tchotchkes. Have you ever seen that Fred Schepisi flick Six Degrees of Separation, in which Will Smith plays Oliver Quick and Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland play Felix’s parents, Elspeth Catton (Rosamund Pike) and Sir James (Richard E. Grant)? That was a good movie. Largely because it didn’t seek to tell a morality tale so much as dissect the vulnerabilities of class division and how easily they’re taken advantage of–and, crucially, how easy it is for the wealthy to reassert their place at the table with a single word, particularly when that word is spoken of a Black kid they were patronizing in the first place. That film ends with the gates to the kingdom shut tighter than before; Saltburn ends with Oliver full starkers dancing in his new position as king of the proverbial castle. So is the message that Oliver is a homicidal queer maniac who is still the lesser of two evils between silly rich people who love their lovely children? Or is it that all rich people began as homicidal queer maniacs who win their standing through homicidal queerness? A replacement theory for the fabulously privileged whereby the barbarians at the gate are potato-looking gay monsters who are nonetheless sexual tyrannosaurs and autodidactic encyclopedias.
I’m giving Fennell too much credit. Saltburn is a pastiche of better movies assembled willy-nilly like prestige Mad Libs. Fennell’s a woman who made a movie about being a woman without thinking much about it, just like she’s a rich person who has now made a movie about rich people without thinking much about it. Why try to understand your biases when the world doesn’t require understanding from the fabulously privileged, only that we understand them? Fennell has mistaken herself for a commoner, and the film stinks of blank condescension. While Oliver schemes and seethes, Felix’s family welcomes him with open arms after the death of his father, feeding and clothing him, introducing him into their world of antiquated ritual and careful avoidance of emotional conversation. It sounds like my dirt-poor family of first-generation Chinese immigrants. In the real world, the wealthy are responsible for most of the things wrong with the world: a pack of Smaugs sitting on their jealously guarded hoards. In Saltburn, they laze around and have fabulous parties, fattened and ditzy until such time as a lamprey attaches itself to them. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t have a lot of empathy for a kid who got into Oxford on a scholarship. It doesn’t scream “poor” and “underprivileged” to me. If it does to you, have I got a film you should see! I like the scene in the middle where Felix forces Oliver to reunite with his estranged mother, driving him there and telling him along the way he’ll be by his side for moral support. When he speaks of the importance of family, he’s drawing no distinction between himself and Oliver’s mom. Felix is a wonderful person, you see; Oliver is an insane person. I like the bit, too, where Oliver drinks Felix’s bathwater because Felix jerked off into it. Later, Oliver even fucks a freshly-dug gravesite–that’s how deep his love is! Oliver is nuts, sure, but is Fennell saying his proximity to wealth has made him so? Is Saltburn about how money is a mutagen? A moral corruptor? Is her message… Haha, message.
Saltburn is what happens when people who don’t have an opinion are told they have insight. Promising Young Woman is dangerous garbage because of this, and to a lesser degree, so is Saltburn, in which rich people networked at every meaningful level across social platforms are seen as benign, besotted Chauncey Gardeners who don’t know how much they have, but why begrudge them, the poor dears? It is Parasite, except the poor people are the parasites–the people of colour, the gay ones, the ones from loving families who have worked to give them meaningless advantages in a world run by dynastic naïfs. Compare it again to Six Degrees of Separation, where the wealthy are instantly entranced by Will Smith’s conman because he presents himself as the child of Sidney Poitier and speaks eloquently about the progressive thought they think they share with him but don’t. The rich are in love with their own philanthropy, the self-manufactured illusion of their essential good in the world against all evidence. They want to “adopt” this perfect Black boy to absolve them of their acquisitiveness. They deserve to get fleeced to the foundations–fuck these patronizing asshats. In Saltburn? The only crime the rich commit is loving too much. What kind of fucking bullshit fucking movie is that? Imagine the version of this written and directed by Boots Riley. Now think about why he doesn’t get this sort of budget, yet Emerald fucking Fennell does.
