Smooth Talk (1985): should now be considered an American classic (Review)

For a reissue of a quiet, low-key movie that isn’t all that well-known, Criterion’s new Blu-Ray of Joyce Chopra’s feature debut Smooth Talk has to do a lot. First off, it has to contribute to correcting the gender imbalance in Criterion’s library, although it isn’t shouldering that burden alone. Over the past few years, Criterion UK has also released female-directed films including Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent, Ann Hui’s Boat People and Girlfriends by Claudia Weill, the latter of whom turns up in the extra features on this disc. More about that later, but let’s deal with the main feature first.

Smooth Talk is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s coming-of-age story ‘Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?’, itself inspired by a magazine article. (The full article is included in the Blu-Ray extras; I urge you to read it only after you watch the movie) Chopra would later helm a miniseries adaptation of Oates’s novel Blonde, recently remade by Andrew Dominik, and it’s easy to see why Oates would trust her with one of her landmark works. It’s not as if Smooth Talk is an ultra-faithful adaptation, but it makes all the right changes. Oates herself nailed the difference between the two works when she said her short story was a fable of sorts, but Chopra’s film is about real, living, breathing people.

That shift can be ascribed to the next reason why Smooth Talk is an important release. Over the years, several of its cast members have gone from being considered “reliable” or “promising” to being legendary, not least its lead. Laura Dern was just seventeen when she played the fifteen-year-old Connie, yet her performance doesn’t have a shred of naivety or inexperience about it. Dern’s performance has all the chaotic energy and eruptive emotion of a real teenager, coupled with a kind of perspective about the trials of adolescence that most people take years to accrue. It’s massively impressive, and it relates beautifully to Connie’s central dilemma. She wants to be older, to be treated as mature, as every teenager does. Yet her independence, confidence and provocative behaviour tends to attract men who are extremely aware she’s not an adult.

Of those men, the most prominent is another name who will attract more attention these days, albeit in ways Criterion couldn’t have foreseen when they announced this title. Treat Williams died in a traffic accident recently, triggering a pleasing outpouring of love for an actor who never quite got his due respect. When he played Arnold Friend (“and that’s what I’d like to be to you!”) in Smooth Talk, he was considered a likely breakthrough star, having worked with Sidney Lumet, Sergio Leone, Steven Spielberg and Milos Forman. Taking a smaller role as such a repellent character was a risk, and it might have harmed his leading-man career. Yet, as his interview in the extra features here shows, he never regretted taking the role. His performance is a delicate balance; his obsession with his car and his corny chat-up lines are likely to make adult viewers cringe themselves into a ball, yet we never lose sight of how they might be intriguing to a girl like Connie, who is less worldly than she likes to think. There’s also something else, a note of genuine, indefinable danger, that Williams wisely never rests too much on.

That danger doesn’t just come from Williams’s performance, but also from the cinematography of Craig Haagensen and Dan Gillham. They’re masters of backlighting, getting identifiably different character-appropriate tones from that same technique; hazy Malickian summer vibes for Connie, inky, noirish shadows for Arnold. For much of its run-time, Smooth Talk is a mood piece, and it’s a mood a lot of modern viewers will enjoy. Chopra ascribes the film’s commercial failure to its incompatibility with contemporary teen-movie trends: good luck getting the audience for John Hughes or Porky’s to lay down their money for Joyce Carol Oates. Yet watched today it’s just as evocative an ’80s time capsule, taking you back to a time when kids stayed out late and the mall was the centre of all social activity. The modern-day film that kept coming to mind as a comparison point was not a teen movie nor a female-directed movie but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Time has granted Smooth Talk a similar retrophiliac hang-out quality to the early stages of Tarantino’s ’60s odyssey, yet like OUATIH there is something unmistakably troubling gathering in the air even when the film is at its most languid.

Back to Claudia Weill, though. Joyce at 34 is a 1972 short co-directed by Weill and Chopra about the latter’s decision to have a child with her screenwriter husband Tom Cole, one which applies penetrating documentary rigour to this very personal subject. If I had on-camera testimony from my own mother saying she thought I was too immature to be a good parent, I would throw myself out of the nearest window; Chopra edited it into a movie.

The mathematically astute among you will have worked out that if Joyce at 34 is a document of Joyce at 34, she must have been in her mid-forties by the time Smooth Talk, her first theatrical release, was made. This is true, and it helps answer the common criticism levelled against these efforts to diversify the canon: surely if these directors were any good, we’d have recognised their talent at the time? Well, no – and the fact that Chopra was so much older than the mid-twenties Wellesian wunderkinds who normally make feature debuts shows us what the problem is here. Directors from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds will not often have the connections, capital or confidence necessary to devote years of their life to an ambitious project straight out of the gate. In the case of female directors, the expectation that women will take the lead in childcare – also spotlighted in another documentary short on this disc, Girls at 12 – keeps a lot of careers on the launchpad.

If late bloomer Chopra never had the dazzling career that Smooth Talk would seem to promise, she did at least make films, many of which are still remembered, many of which are gathered here. As well as the two shorts mentioned above, Clorae and Albie adds race to Chopra’s range of documentary subjects, and there are film festival retrospectives on Smooth Talk which – as well as the previously mentioned conversations with Chopra and Williams – allow Oates, Dern and her screen mother Mary Kay Place to talk about a film they remain justifiably proud of. Unlike its lead character, Smooth Talk took a while to mature; like its lead actress, it should now be considered an American classic.

Graham’s Archive: Smooth Talk (1985)