A rich variety of class-conscious opinions about Saltburn

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This article was published 12/01/2024 (971 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I admit I was fascinated by Saltburn, the lightly depraved British satire that made a brief stop in Winnipeg theatres in December and is now streaming on Prime Video.

I’ve become even more fascinated by the responses to it.

Filmmaker Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) tells the story of sad-eyed Oliver Quick (The Banshees of Inisherin’s Barry Keoghan). A student at Oxford in the mid-oughts, he is obsessed with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi from Priscilla), the careless, beautiful son of an aristocratic, ultra-rich family.

Felix’s snobbish set may dismiss Oliver as “a scholarship boy” with a bad haircut and terrible clothes, but Felix is drawn to Ollie’s stories of growing up in poverty and dysfunction — so real and so emotionally authentic.

He decides to take Oliver to his historic country home, the titular Saltburn, for the long vac. (That would be summer break for the rest of us.)

The house and its grounds ooze ancestral wealth, with Shakespeare folios and a “f—-ing hideous” Rubens, along with the 21st-century glamour of sex, drugs and Pet Shop Boys karaoke.

Cataloguing all this luxury, the movie is slinky and seductive, with a fabulous look and sound. (Even Saltburn’s detractors will allow that it’s got vibes.)

It’s also uneven and all over the place.

Keoghan once again does incredible things with that extraordinary face, which looks like it’s been moulded out of putty but left slightly unfinished. Elordi is electrifyingly attractive. Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant, as Felix’s callous, idiotic parents, are very funny.

The narrative, though, cobbled together from bits of Evelyn Waugh, Patricia Highsmith and, as one critic has remarked, old Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues, is at first vaguely unsatisfying and by the end quite undone by a “twist” that renders everything that’s gone before less interesting rather than more.

For a film this flawed, this slight and this silly, Saltburn has generated some outsized reactions. (Just a word: Many of these evaluations contain spoilers — no one is quite what they seem at Saltburn — so you might want to watch the movie before you dive in.)

Over at the New York-based Vulture, the cultural commenters all agreed the movie was stupid, but they convened a round table to decide whether it was good-stupid or bad-stupid.

The Guardian, being British, was predictably hung up on the film’s class politics, and published a roundup of reactions in which many of the commentators posed pointed class-conscious questions. Were the wealthy characters toxic enough? (Maybe not.) Were their unbelievably lavish, sexed-up, coked-out, synth-pop parties portrayed as too much fun? (Oh, almost certainly.)

Several of these critics felt obliged to locate themselves precisely on the privilege ladder — there are mentions of growing up on council estates or having a parent who went to a posh boarding school. And there are critiques of Fennell’s own class credentials, which run closer to Felix’s than Ollie’s.

One Guardian writer conceded that he couldn’t quite resist the movie’s lure: “I’ve never wanted to be fantastically rich. I do now.” Another opined that Saltburn was both “objectionable” and “terribly enjoyable.”

At Slate, critic Mark Harris’s contribution to the discourse was defiantly titled “Yes, I Will Defend the Politics of Saltburn.” Harris found himself dismayed that “some people take the movie to task essentially for being an insufficient ally in the Great Class Struggle.”

He himself finds the politics “impish.”

So, in its attitude to obscene wealth, is Saltburn intriguingly ambiguous or just waffly?

Fennell is clear that her rich characters are absolutely awful. (This isn’t Downton Abbey.) But she is willing to make them — and all their stuff — sexy. Responding to the haters, Fennell has suggested, “If we can understand why this is so alluring, in spite of its palpable cruelty and unfairness and sort of strangeness, if we all want to be there too, I think that’s just such an interesting dynamic.”

She could have a point. The Triangle of Sadness, for instance, another recent entry in the eat-the-rich genre, might seem more ideologically stern and pure with its super-yachting, super-rich arms dealers and Russian oligarchs indulging in so much overconsumption they end up literally rolling around in their own puke.

In one sense, that’s a harsh indictment, but in another way, it actually offers an easy out for a middle-class audience. I mean, of course we don’t want to be like that. Yuck.

But a Saltburn party with a hedge maze and champagne and a great soundtrack and beautiful young people dressed as fallen angels? Well, maybe just an invite.

Fennell’s strategy is risky but, at some base level, shrewd. She makes us desire things, and then make us uncomfortable — very uncomfortable — about our desire. Saltburn may be nihilistic and nasty, shallow and insubstantial, but in its own weird way, it’s effective.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com