Meryl Streep and Lucas Hedges set sail in the Let Them All Talk trailer

As hap­pens once every decade and a half, I was wrong about some­thing: when recent­ly report­ing that Steven Soder­bergh had begun assem­bling a cast for his upcom­ing action pic­ture No Sud­den Moves, I men­tioned that 2020 would be the first year with­out new work of some sort from the writer-direc­tor, as his com­plet­ed fea­ture Let Them All Talk was still on the shelf at the time. But HBO Max has come along to save the day, set­ting a sud­den stream­ing release next month and grant­i­ng us the first trail­er to go along with it.

The plot revolves around writer Alice Hugh­es (Meryl Streep, a new addi­tion to the Soder­bergh reper­to­ry ros­ter with last year’s The Laun­dro­mat), a well-regard­ed nov­el­ist with a less than pro­lif­ic out­put. Her pub­lish­er (Gem­ma Chan) needs a new man­u­script and pron­to, so she sends Alice’s nephew (Lucas Hedges) on a cruise with her and her two long­time pals (Dianne Wiest and Can­dice Bergen) to keep an eye on what turns out to be a stalled cre­ative process.

While hand­some­ly pho­tographed by Soder­bergh him­self, once again act­ing as his own cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er in a non-iPhone capac­i­ty this time, it does appear to be one of his more humbly-scaled pro­duc­tions. The action hard­ly leaves the ship on which Alice and her friends put­ter about, meet peo­ple, play Monop­oly, and reflect on the turns their lives have tak­en, lend­ing their activ­i­ties a con­tained hang­out vibe uncom­mon in the filmmaker’s oeuvre.

With a tal­ent as out­spo­ken as Soder­bergh, it’s always tempt­ing to read some per­son­al state­ment into the projects he choos­es, and as a dra­ma focused on artis­tic stag­na­tion, this one offers itself right up. So many of his films revolve around genius­es grap­pling with the dif­fi­cul­ty of doing their work their way in the face of cajol­ing insti­tu­tions and struc­tures of pow­er. Per­haps he’s felt like a Meryl Streep him­self, lap-swim­ming while the man­age­r­i­al class tries to get him to do their bidding.

At any rate, this con­tin­ues Soderbergh’s dal­liance with the world of stream­ing, his third fea­ture in a row to bypass the­aters and go direct­ly to the inter­net. Along with the hope that we will one day over­come the pan­dem­ic cur­rent­ly restrict­ing life around the world, so too do we hope that one day we may use that safe­ty to see a new Steven Soder­bergh movie in a theater.

Let Them All Talk comes to HBO Max on 10 December.