'Smooth Talk' & The Dark Side Of Attraction: Unpacking Female Perspectives In The Laura Dern-Starring Overlooked '85 Classic [NYFF]

As Hollywood tries to balance the enormous gender disparity among directors, many critics and audiences are looking back with added respect on past works of female filmmakers, trying to reframe traditional notions of film history by focusing on different perspectives.  One film that perfectly encapsulates the difference a female perspective can make is 1985’s “Smooth Talk,” whose new restoration is being celebrated among the revivals of the 58th New York Film Festival.  To reflect on what they brought to the material and why the film still feels so relevant today, Alicia Malone, the host of TCM’s “Woman Make Film,” virtually gathered star Laura Dern, director Joyce Chopra, and writer Joyce Carol Oates. 

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Based on a 1966 short story by Oates, the still timely “Smooth Talk” is the quietly devastating story of fifteen-year-old Connie (Dern), a teenage girl yearning to be older and straining against the confines of home, whose desire and naiveté is spotted and exploited by an older man, Arnold Friend (Treat Williams) in an unforgettable slow-burn encounter that takes up the film’s final thirty minutes. Connie is on the cusp of adulthood, neither a child nor an adult, and part of the film’s power lies in the different perspectives with which the audience is allowed to view Connie and how Connie’s own perspective shifts throughout the film as she learns the dark side of attraction.  The idea of perspective kept recurring throughout Malone’s talk with the filmmakers, both in how the story changed as it filtered through their viewpoints and how different audiences can view Connie and Arnold Friend so differently. 

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Oates described how when she first wrote the story, she was basing it off the Tucson area serial killer Charles Schmid.  Despite the story’s topicality, she conceived of it in very classical terms, comparing Friend to a Hawthorne symbolic protagonist and, when she first titled the piece “Death and the Maiden,” thinking in terms of medieval woodcuts where a grim reaper figure would lurk in the background as a memento mori.  Feminist critics have often complained that serial killer stories celebrate the personalities of male killers at the expense of their female victims, but the evolution of “Smooth Talk” shows a different possible trajectory.  While writing, Oates decided that the psychology of the predator Arnold Friend was far less interesting than that of Connie; the real question in the story was why would Connie be so alienated from her family and home to trust the transparently suspicious Friend.  After this insight, Oates conceived of the generational conflict undergirding the action, specifically Connie butting heads with her mother, whom Connie is convinced doesn’t see the ‘real’ her.

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Oates knew the mother-daughter conflict was crucial, but the encounter with Friend takes up the bulk of her story.  As Joyce Chopra (and her late husband, writer Tom Cole) adapted the story into “Smooth Talk,” they fleshed out Connie’s home life with details from their own teen daughters.  Chopra explained that to her, the film’s real story was the mother-daughter conflict, without which Connie would not have been home alone for Arnold’s visit in the first place.  To this end, they painted a convincing portrait of Connie caught up in a 1980s mallrat culture, with a well-meaning but deluded father, an impatient mother, and an overall feeling of incompleteness, symbolized by the house’s unfinished paint job.

When Chopra cast the film, she was determined to find someone young enough to share Connie’s lack of perspective (at least at the onset).  Looking back, Laura Dern explained how at fifteen, she shared Connie’s naiveté and was “still in the throes of an entrenched mother-daughter relationship” (check out “Wild at Heart” to see Dern and her mother share the screen).  Dern praised both Oates and Chopra for their “haunted capturing of adolescence” and said that when she was cast, she was like Connie, wanting to be seen by men and boys, but also somewhat “missing the point” of what that meant, which was necessary.  Chopra praised Dern’s shape-shifting ability to look 12 in some shots and 18 in others, an ability shared with the ambiguously aged Arnold Friend.  Dern also gave credit to Director of Photography James Glennon, himself the father of teen girls at the time, which lent a protective quality to shots of Connie. 

“Smooth Talk” lets the audience see Connie from two perspectives, those of youth and experience, and the power of the climax is that Connie transitions from one to the other in front of our eyes.  Dern highlighted the transition in the line, “What if my eyes were brown?” recalling Chopra’s direction that “a part of her would survive the encounter and want to feel like she’d been in control.”  Dern said that all these years later, she finds that mix of perspectives to be complicated and scary, “to hold the terror but think of survivor’s shame.” 

Dern said that the set was a very safe space for her to explore these issues, yet the film was still a darkly illuminating experience for her.  Surprisingly, she said that it wasn’t making the film, but hearing reactions to it, that was truly her entry into adulthood.  While some champions of the film like Steven Spielberg called it “traumatizing,” other viewers missed the point and called Connie “the sexiest character ever.”  Even more than the material itself, Dern said the different perspectives people saw it with revealed to her the danger underpinning the adult world of desire and sexuality.  Chopra and Oates echoed that people have come up with far-fetched interpretations (“it was all a dream!”) to avoid grappling with the film’s more obvious interpretation. 

Note, NYFF lists “Smooth Talk” as a Janus Films release and its new 4K restoration undertaken by the Criterion Collection, so you can expect to see that on Blu-Ray/DVD, very likely sometime in 2021 from Criterion.

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