‘Saltburn’ Didn’t Deserve an Oscar — It’s Still Great
Many great movies are made every year. They just keep coming. Some are hilarious, others make you cry, and very occasionally they might spark a new thought. They do not all require prizes.
Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn did something nearly every other 2023 movie could not: Start an argument. Released into award season as a tawdry kind of counterprogramming against more serious fare, the movie provided a big bad jolt of decadent fun at a time when such things are hard to come by. Oxford scholarship student Oliver (Barry Keoghan), earnest and doe-eyed but also a bit of a drip, insinuates himself into a circle of glamorous and staggeringly wealthy students at least in part to stay closer to Felix, an upper-class heartthrob who has caught his eye (Jacob Elordi). Once ensconced on Felix’s family estate of Saltburn, Oliver moves past romantic obsession to something more primal.
Because of this, people got excited. They thrilled to the luscious and vaguely rotted environment (Fennell, there’s a remake of Death in Venice with your name on it), not to mention the music, strobing cinematography, faded aristocrats whistling past their graves, the gritty eroticism brought by Keoghan and Elordi, and a dash of necrophilia; it’s the kind of movie meant to launch a hundred Cinema Studies essays about “the gaze.” The movie’s boosters did not care too much or at all about how tightly the plot threads were knitted up in the all-too-much-of-that conclusion. They got on board and enjoyed the ride.
Because of that, others were irritated. Saltburn was accused of being less than the sum of its parts. It was fileted for being too derivative (Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith set to a MGMT beat), too explanatory in a Bond villain way, too ambiguous about where its protagonist was on the sexuality spectrum, and refusing to deliver moral clarity about who the goodies and baddies were. This last seemed especially irritating to many, who were looking for perhaps a more triumphant and declarative denouncement of the upper-class strata the less-well-off Oliver has infiltrated. But while Fennell’s satire of the toffs is constant and cutting, she never loses sight of their humanity.
Saying too much more would give away the twists and turns. Saltburn’s critics are not wrong when they cut it up for being both nonsensical and just too damn much at the end. It did not need the big spelling out Fennell provides. But given what she did with Promising Young Woman, that appears to be what she does. David Mamet will introduce a switcheroo at the last minute which may or may not make sense; it’s just going to happen.
Disappointing ending or not, Saltburn is a gaudy and wicked treat that’s almost smart enough to get away with anything. Nevertheless, the idea that it was somehow snubbed by this year’s 2024 Oscar nominations is hard to swallow. Better films were completely ignored, from How to Blow Up a Pipeline to Leave the World Behind and The Lesson (a subtler, better-acted sibling to the shallower Saltburn which also co-starred the great Richard E. Grant).
But this year’s Oscars got more right than wrong. Even with throwing everything they could at steamrollers like Oppenheimer (which is simply what happens some years), the voters didn’t forget great work like American Fiction, Past Lives, and The Holdovers that need the attention brought by awards and are honestly more likely to stand the test of time than Fennell’s movie.
Saltburn is a great time produced by a great director without being a great movie.
And that is perfectly okay.
Title: Saltburn
Director/writer: Emerald Fennell
Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe
Studio: Amazon MGM
Year: 2023
