Emerald Fennell (2023)
Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which opened this year’s London Film Festival, confirms a nearly infallible rule of cinema-going: beware any film praised as ‘deliciously dark’ (by Deadline in this case – others may well follow). The same applies to plenty more review clichés – ‘wise, warm and wryly amusing’ comes immediately to mind, although no one’s likely to use those words about Fennell’s second feature, perhaps least of all the writer-director herself. She has said (according to Gold Derby) that her main aim in making the film was for ‘everyone to, you know, hate it, love it, be turned on, be freaked out…whatever it makes you feel. I want people to feel something’. Not a sky-high ambition but there’s no denying Saltburn is quite a combination. It’s both offensive and silly, and the two things rarely get in each other’s way.
The story, set in the mid-noughties, begins at the start of Oxford University’s academic year, though at a college with a made-up name. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), from Merseyside, is an English scholar, a fresher and a misfit. Upper crust students in the quad are tickled to see him wearing subfusc, collar and tie, even the college scarf. At his first tutorial Oliver astounds his professor (Reece Shearsmith) with the news that he has already read everything on the reading list; his fellow tutee – a languid, lofty African American called Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe) – arrives fashionably late for the tutorial, where he oozes scorn for Oliver’s earnest articulacy. In the college dining hall, Oliver finds himself sitting opposite Michael Gavey (Ewan Mitchell), a half-demented maths whizz and seemingly the only other non-posh student at the college. Unlike Oliver, Michael is noisily rancorous about the contempt in which he’s held by the ruling-class majority.
Things don’t improve socially for Oliver over the course of his first year except, and crucially, in the lithe shape of Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). (A short prologue, with Oliver addressing the camera, has already made clear that Felix will be an important character and come to a bad end.) He and Oliver bump into each other when Felix’s cycle has a puncture; Oliver offers the loan of his bike so that Felix can get to a lecture in time. Felix doesn’t forget the kindness. In a pub around Christmas time, he comes to the rescue when vile Farleigh pressures Oliver into buying a round that’s way beyond his slender means. Oliver confides in Felix about his unhappy background – he’s an only child, virtually estranged from his alcoholic and/or drug-addicted parents; midway through exams, he announces, in some distress, that his father has died suddenly. Patrician Felix invites his pleb friend to spend the summer vacation at his family’s country estate. Oliver accepts the invitation.
Saltburn is named not for the real seaside town in North Yorkshire but for the Catton family’s stately home (actually Drayton House in Northamptonshire). The household includes few surprises. Oliver is admitted by an officious, ghoulish butler (Paul Rhys). Felix’s father Sir James (Richard E Grant) is, most of the time, a familiar eccentric aristocrat: reading out bits of the morning paper at the family breakfast table, he seems to be talking to himself. His much younger wife Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), an ex-model, is fragrant, charming and verbally ruthless. She’s much relieved when ‘poor dear’ Pamela (Carey Mulligan), a drugged-up-to-the-eyeballs house guest, eventually takes her leave of Saltburn; when her death is reported a couple of scenes later, Elspeth scoffs that Pamela will do anything for attention. The younger generation includes Venetia (Alison Oliver), the Cattons’ nubile, unstable daughter, as well as Felix and Farleigh, who turns out to be a poor relation of the Cattons, subsidised by Sir James.
Like, for instance, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the title denotes, as well as a physical location, a state of mind which is eventually vindicated in that location. Oliver’s state of mind is one of obsessive, envious desire; the Cattons’ pile is almost the objective correlative of the desire and certainly the stage on which it plays out. Fennell’s set-up may be inspired by Brideshead Revisited and The Go-Between but Saltburn has a distinctive tone, announced even in the opening title sequence. The credits, in red Gothic script, are accompanied by Handel’s Zadok the Priest, with its clarion connotations (especially in 2023) of king-making. This introduction – jokily extravagant, more than faintly macabre – prepares the ground for a social-comedy-cum-vampire-story. Early on, it’s doubly easy to root for Barry Keoghan’s Oliver because nearly every other character at Oxford is abominable or overplayed or both. (Jacob Elordi’s Felix is neither but this Adonis figure is – from the outset – an image seen through Oliver’s eyes rather than an independent personality.) Once Oliver is over the threshold at Saltburn, the good acting extends beyond Keoghan’s – thanks to Rosamund Pike’s stylish delivery and Carey Mulligan, zonked yet vivid – but it’s too soon obvious that Oliver has an agenda and what that agenda is.
This Oliver is Quick rather than Twist but there are suggestions of his Victorian precursor beyond the shared forename. Dickens subtitled his novel The Parish Boy’s Progress and Saltburn might be ‘The Scholarship Boy’s Progress’: Oliver Quick keeps asking for more, and getting it. The L P Hartley and Evelyn Waugh influences are more salient, though – in the case of Waugh so salient that Fennell acknowledges them: when Felix tells him about bad blood and black sheep in the Catton family, Oliver thinks that ‘It sounds like an Evelyn Waugh novel’; Felix replies that Waugh based most of his characters on earlier generations of Cattons and their kin. Vague remarks but the Brideshead echoes in Saltburn are hard to ignore: a male friendship born at Oxford; one boy from a dismal background, the other the glamorous, doomed scion of an aristocratic family; the former fascinated by the latter’s house and kin, and what they signify. At Felix’s funeral, there’s even a teddy bear atop the coffin. The Go-Between connections are relatively minor in terms of theme but not in terms of scenario. The two boys in Hartley’s novel are younger – at boarding school rather than university – but the cleverer, poorer boy’s stay at the rich boy’s family’s country home during summer holidays, generates the main plot. The climactic events in The Go-Between take place on the visitor’s birthday, as they do here. Unfortunately, though, these events aren’t nearly the end of Fennell’s film. Like the ill-fated Pamela, Saltburn overstays its welcome and you end up thinking it will do anything for attention.
Promising Young Woman (2020), her first feature, had serious weaknesses but left no doubt about Emerald Fennell’s wit, flair and what might be termed her zeitgeist-alertness. The same qualities are in evidence in Saltburn to much less satisfying effect. Fennell has a facility for writing acerbic one-liners. She knows it and, in this film, over-indulges it – the clever writing makes the same social points ad nauseam. She also has a talent for sexual imagery which goes further than expected, and so is more startling. At Saltburn, through a bathroom door keyhole, Oliver watches Felix masturbating in the bath; once Felix has left the bathroom, Oliver leans into the bath and laps up fluid left round the plughole. He and Venetia have sex while she’s menstruating, which suits bloodsucker Oliver just fine. In this department too, though, Fennell keeps upping the ante until the shock tactics pay diminishing returns. After Felix’s funeral and the departure of the other mourners, Oliver has an erection and prostrates himself over Felix’s grave; you don’t feel much about this quasi-necrophilia except that the director is showing off.
Zeitgeist-alertness in Saltburn is skewed and stymied by, I suspect, Fennell’s own background. The film taps into the received idea that social status and affluence still carry excessive weight in England, restricting the best educational and career opportunities to the privileged few: products of the top public schools are over-represented in government, in the Oxbridge student population, even at the top of the acting profession. There’s truth, of course, in all three contentions. The last has gained a new prominence in recent years and Fennell’s casting of Barry Keoghan in Saltburn might therefore seem irreproachable. This young Dublin-born actor was raised by a mother who struggled with drug addiction. She died when he was twelve; Barry and his brother spent the next seven years in foster care. Keoghan has made it without the benefit of money or nepotism or conventional good looks. He has built a successful film career playing variously bizarre and/or disadvantaged characters in supporting roles – in Dunkirk (2017), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), American Animals (2018), culminating in his BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated performance in The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). He’s an oddball again in Saltburn but he has the starring role in a big-name cast. And Oliver becomes, if not quite a romantic lead, at least a sexually not-to-be-sneezed-at figure.
Unfortunately for Keoghan, he’s playing a character who, even in the flamboyantly non-naturalistic setting of Saltburn, is less than plausible – and deplorably conceived. Emerald Fennell was an Oxford student in the noughties, at Greyfriars, then a ‘permanent private hall’ of the University[1]. Prior to that, she was privately educated, at Marlborough College. She knows her story’s Oxford context from personal experience; her protagonist’s personal context may be another matter. Fennell makes an immediate point having the posh students in the quad snigger at Oliver for looking his awkward best. It surprised this viewer they even bothered to notice him but maybe Fennell herself was once struck by the spectacle of an Oxford new boy so ill at ease with the place that he thought wearing his grown-up’s school uniform was the done thing – maybe she wondered what on earth such a boy’s background could be. Oliver’s invention of his background is exposed when Felix, as a birthday surprise, drives him to Merseyside to the home of his recently widowed mother. (Not sure how Felix got hold of the address but let that pass.) It turns out she’s neither a widow nor by any stretch of the imagination a drug user or alcoholic. Oliver’s mother (Dorothy Atkinson) and father (Shaun Dooley) both seem thoroughly respectable. They live in a pleasant, modest, suburban house. They’re delighted to welcome Oliver on his birthday and with such a nice new friend – they’re only sorry they don’t see more of their son or even hear from him.
Oliver may be an accomplished and, until this point, a successful liar but it seems he wasn’t making things up when he told Felix he had no friends at school: his parents confirm this to Felix. Why should that be? Fennell appears to assume that in the state system anyone brainy must have been considered a freak and isolated accordingly. She also implies that English class structures are so pernicious and compelling that the likes of Oliver are bound to be driven by furious, thwarted materialism – a thesis hardly more edifying than a right-wing press editorial decrying ‘the politics of envy’. If she’s not suggesting this and regards her anti-hero not as representative but as a sociopathic anomaly, what’s the point of her story – and why make Oliver the socio-economic inferior of everyone else in it? I might be more ready to give Fennell the benefit of the doubt about this if I didn’t think she preferred her super-rich characters. She’s too clever to say so explicitly. As she told Vanity Fair recently:
‘My favorite thing in general is sympathy for the devil … The sorts of people that we can’t stand, the sorts of people who are abhorrent—if we can love them, if we can fall in love with these people, 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.’
This still smacks of seeing the Cattons as irresistible monsters – as, because of their lifestyle and ‘values’, so much more fun than hoi-polloi.
It will be clear from a few paragraphs back that Oliver is determined to screw, in one way or another, the members of the Catton family. There are occasional unwelcome interruptions to his progress, such as the birthday drive to his parents’ home; for the most part, though, he plots his takeover as capably as the have-nots in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019). Fennell’s most effective reveal comes in a flashback that shows Oliver letting down Felix’s bicycle tyre before the ‘chance’ fateful encounter that starts things between them. This does more than disclose that Oliver had a plan from a very early stage. It also reminds us that – long ago in the narrative – we were led to think that a romantic impulse, rather than cupidity, drove Oliver to cultivate Felix. Saltburn might have been a much better film if Fennell had been able to sustain an idea of mixed motives on Oliver’s part for longer. Instead, she gets to using his sexual behaviour as a lurid expression of material covetousness.
Given its subject, Saltburn needs to look expensive and there’s no denying it does although this too sometimes seems OTT. For Oliver’s birthday, Elspeth arranges a cast-of-thousands gathering in the grounds of Saltburn; this comes across, even allowing for the event’s tragic climax, as a spectacular set piece for the sake of it. The best part of the birthday evening is smaller scale: a karaoke episode inside the house, where Oliver is made to sing to Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Rent’, does so lamely then resourcefully makes Farleigh take over the microphone: as Oliver says, the lyric applies equally to him. The moment is charged partly because ‘Rent’ is just such a great song but it also chimes nicely with the pair’s first tutorial at Oxford; even then, Oliver was prepared to stand up to Farleigh’s sarcasm.
It’s striking that Emerald Fennell’s words to Vanity Fair include ‘if we can love them, if we can fall in love with [them] …’ She has Oliver, in the prologue to Saltburn and when this is reprised at the other end of the film, say of Felix that ‘I loved him – but was I in love with him?’ That’s a potentially tantalising distinction. In contrast, Oliver’s closing speech is a letdown: he tells us once more that he loved Felix but that ‘I also hated him’. You don’t say. Barry Keoghan’s acting holds up tenaciously but in the last part of the film Fennell runs out of ideas of things for him to do, except behave garishly. In the final scene, with the grand house emptied of its former occupants and Oliver alone and in charge there, Keoghan is required to prance naked round the place, to the accompaniment of ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’. This continues even through part of the closing credits. Saltburn is offensive and silly to the last.
5 October 2023
[1] Oxford’s PPHs (says Wikipedia) ‘principally differ from colleges in the sense that the latter are governed by the fellows of the college, whereas the governance of a PPH fully or partially rests with the corresponding Christian denomination’; even so, ‘Students at PPHs are members of the University of Oxford and have full access to the university’s facilities and activities’.
