Off the Beaten Path

I don’t know the average age of a Lakeville Journal reader, but my guess is that most of us were in the second group to get the COVID vaccine. 

So why would any of us want to watch “Pen15,” in which two 30-year-old actresses play two 13-year-old kids, starting seventh grade, surely the depth of darkest adolescence. Perhaps because we’ve already watched “The Crown,” “The Queen’s Gambit” and the other usual suspects, and we have a lot of streaming time on our pandemic schedule. 

But the main reason to catch this show is to see amazing performances by the show’s creators and stars, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle. Erskine plays Maya Ishii Peters, a Japanese-American girl with a bowl cut, and Konkle is Anna Kone, blonde with braces, her best friend.  

Their classmates are real-life seventh graders and are perfect. The show’s tone is mostly charming and hilarious comedy as Anna and Maya discover beer, masturbation, boys and fashion. 

But there are serious moments when Maya confronts racism and Anna deals with her parents’ divorce. Their show won a Critics’ Choice TV award for best comedy series, and I’d be surprised if you did not fall in love with these two gals. Two seasons on Hulu.

A more obvious fit for readers of this paper is Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, “Let Them All Talk,” starring Salisbury’s Meryl Streep and featuring Cornwall’s Dan Algrant.  

Soderbergh shot the film aboard an actual voyage of the Queen Mary 2, and much of the dialogue was improvised. Streep plays Alice Hughes, a renowned literary novelist on her way to the UK to receive an award.  

She’s accompanied by two college friends, Roberta (Candice Bergen) and Susan (Dianne Wiest), and Alice’s nephew, Tyler (Lucas Hedges). 

Be warned that the film takes some time to gather steam, as Soderbergh aims his camera at the three ladies and, well, lets them all talk. You may find yourself wishing you were aboard the Lusitania instead, with a U-Boat lurking off the starboard bow. (Is starboard right or left?)  

Patience will be rewarded as the plot heats up quickly enough. Tyler falls for Alice’s lovely literary agent, Karen (Gemma Chan). 

Then the ladies form an attachment to another writer on board, Kelvin Krantz (Dan Algrant). Krantz writes trashy thrillers that soar to the top of the bestseller lists. Alice initially sniffs at Krantz, who says his books take three months to write. “That long?” Alice asks. 

But Krantz turns out to be quite a gentleman and a big fan.

Finally, who is that man seen leaving Alice’s room early in the morning? After the ship arrives, the film moves to a surprising and even shocking conclusion. 

Soderbergh is hard to pin down because of the variety of his work, but he is probably best known for crime thrillers such as “Traffic” and “Out of Sight.” Don’t expect anything like that, but this film is surely worth streaming to see three of our finest actresses at work in an unusual setting. On HBO Max.

Ed Ferman is the former editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and has been an editor at the Cornwall Chronicle for many years. He has lived in Cornwall since 1969.