Written by Tom Cole
Directed by Joyce Chopra
A Nepenthe/American Playhouse Theatrical Production
Everything about this movie is banal except the very things that make it a peculiar and irreplaceable work of art.
Certainly, there is nothing unique in the plot. In fact, it’s essentially that old wheezer of a formula that has done service for countless teen novels, any of which might be entitled One Poignant Summer. An adolescent girl, troubled by the onset of puberty and exasperated by uncomprehending parents, tests the waters of sexuality with a fellow who turns out to be Mr. Wrong. Betrayed by him, she runs back to the arms of her family. And I can imagine a viewer, lulled by the color camerawork and reassuringly familiar dilemmas of Smooth Talk‘s opening scenes, allowing himself to fall asleep mentally for the duration of the film and later convincing himself that he has seen nothing but that old hackneyed story.
But before Smooth Talk is ten minutes old on the screen, we may notice that something unusual is happening. The images aren’t just pretty in themselves; they are also linking up, recalling each other, contradicting each other, colliding, reinforcing, reverberating. Apparently, there are people at work behind the camera who are pursuing a vision of life and insisting that we pursue the vision with them.
Here is an example fifteen-year-old heroine, Connie, and one of her friends, growing jaded with their innocent adventures with boys their own age at the local mall, decide to check out a nearby hamburger joint inhabited by a somewhat older crowd. Their immediate intention is not an actual sexual encounter but simply the excitement of having male attention focused on them, the flattery of male cajolery, the uniquely female power of choosing to listen or not to listen to a lot of masculine smooth talk. We watch Connie innocently flirting with an obviously enthralled boy. At one point, she walks over to a juke box to choose a song. Another record is still in progress and, feeling the exhilaration of her latest conquest, she dances as she moves toward the machine. We hear the music that she hears and understand how she feels, so her dancing seems natural, sensual but not sexually provocative, joyous and not taunting.
Then, suddenly, with a cut to another shot, we find ourselves outside the hangout and looking at Connie through a window. A man is watching Connie with us. We have met him before in a previous scene when he briefly approached the girl to let her know, in a vaguely sinister way, that he has his eye on her. He is a thirty-ish drifter, with a self-cultivated resemblance to James Dean. (Connie has a poster of James Dean on her bedroom wall.) He appears tough, canny, and possibly dangerous. And now we watch Connie from his point of view because the camera is right behind him. Now we can no longer hear the music as Connie hears it and can’t respond to it as she responds to it. Now she seems to be dancing in silence and primarily for the delectation of this drifter. And so, what a moment ago seemed innocent abandon now comes across as wanton provocation. A girl who was just releasing her pent-up energy is now, in the eye of a rather nasty beholder, a sex object.
But that’s not all. Several scenes later, when Connie is in the same joint and again moves toward the jukebox, the camera again shifts to the same position outside the hangout. Once more, we see Connie undulate unaccompanied by music. Once more, we are forced to perceive her as the wanton we know she is not. But, this time, the drifter isn’t in the shot. He’s nowhere in sight. Yet both the camera angle and Connie’s movement are almost exactly the same as before. Surely the drifter must be just out of camera range, standing just behind us. Or is he there at all? The effect is sinister in a very ambiguous way. If he’s there, then he’s hidden from us as well as from Connie. It’s one thing to have a dangerous person within sight so that we can anticipate what he’s going to do next. It’s quite something else to have him behind us breathing down our necks. And, if he isn’t there, then are we the only voyeurs? If the former, we share Connie’s peril. If the latter, we share the drifter’s sleaziness. In either case, a mere change of camera set-up has taken us from a world of sensual innocence to a world of sexual menace.
But what has Connie done to deserve such sinister focus? She isn’t trying to tantalize or humiliate the boys whose attentions she solicits. Tired of her mother’s scolding and her father’s infatuation with petty material comforts, she tests her attractiveness as the only source of power she has, her only way of making an incision into life, of making her presence felt in the world. Besides, she’s barely fifteen years old. It’s unfair to demand that she bear the consequences of a little innocent flirtation.
But life is unfair. While her parents and sister are away at a barbeque, the drifter shows up at Connie’s house. “Hi. I’m Arnold Friend, and that’s what I want to be to you. A. Friend.” Thus begins the climax of the movie and one of the most subtly disturbing sequences ever filmed.
The hour that we have witnessed so far has been a preparation for this scene. We have been made acquainted with Connie’s boredom with her homelife, her shaky sense of identity, and the power she tries to discover in herself and exert over others through sexuality. Now we watch Arnold Friend, a bush-league Charles Manson, play upon her discontent, her isolation, shaky identity, and curiosity about sex with the virtuosity of the canny sociopath that he is. This seduction is a twenty-five minute scene that is composed so fluidly and knit so neatly that it gives the illusion of having been filmed in one take. Except for a few opening and closing minutes in the front yard, the entire scene (nearly one-third of the film) takes place in a front hallway. We have been in this hallway before with Connie as she idled in it on long summer evenings, slumping against the walls in her boredom. Now, on a bright summer afternoon, it is a place of nightmare as Arnold Friend stands on the porch and talks through the screen door to the girl who first stands and then crouches in the darkness of the hallway.
There is absolutely no physical violence in the scene, not even much overt threat of violence. Yet Arnold’s sexual approach is no less than a muted form of brainwashing. He doesn’t tell Connie he wants to be her lover, but that he already is her lover. She starts to lock the screen door, but he reminds her that a screen door is a very flimsy thing. He suggests that if her house were mysteriously set on fire, she would come running outside and into his arms. He asks her if she knows the neighbor lady down the road. That woman is dead, Connie replies. But don’t you want to know her? Arnold persists. She runs to the phone and starts to dial for the police. But it’s silly to dial the police, Arnold tells her, since the place she used to be doesn’t exist anymore and where she thought she was going is cancelled out. Anyway, “the idea is not for me to come inside to you but for you to come outside to me, where you belong.”
Where you belong. That Connie decides that she does belong in Arnold Friend’s arms for one afternoon is bound to infuriate many viewers. “Why doesn’t she show a little common sense?” they will be bound to ask. Ah, yes. A little common sense. Teen novels (Judy Blume and Co.) and teen movies (Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, et al.) keep telling youngsters to hang on, be patient with those oafish adults who surround them, practice a little hygienic sex only with the one they really and truly like, and, at all costs, try to be true to themselves. But what these literary and cinematic Poloniuses never dare to ask is, what sense of self does an adolescent have? And is there really a world that responds unfailingly to reason and hygiene awaiting him/her on the other side of adolescence?
Director Joyce Chopra and writer Tom Cole (and, doubtless, Joyce Carol Oates, whose short story, on which the film is based, I haven’t read) dare to ask these questions, and the answers they come up with are pretty grim. Arnold Friend’s “smooth talk” isn’t just the badinage of seduction, but a verbal knife that momentarily cuts Connie loose from the moorings of identity. It’s no use telling Connie to be true to herself when she’s not quite sure what that self is. And as for sexual hygiene, is there a sex manual that tells a girl what to do when the sociopath on the other side of the screen door hints that he might just burn down the house? Smooth Talk is too full of real terror and too lacking in easy answers to pass muster as a teen movie.
This is Joyce Chopra’s first theatrical film and there’s too much solid craftsmanship on display to regard it as a possible fluke. We are bound to get more good movies from her, and perhaps some of them will be written by her collaborator here, Tom Cole, who is also her husband. Their marriage can’t explain the fact that image and word seem to be the work of a single consciousness, but at least it makes future work together likely.
Not the least feat of teamwork is the performance of Laura Dern as Connie. Even if Dern were not a potent actress, she would be the right raw material for this role. Her beauty is chameleon: from certain angles she has the pained, exacerbated lyricism of a pre-Ralphaelite model; and the very next moment she looks as bland as some drum-majorette in a Coke commercial. But since she is an actress, far beyond her years in understanding of movement and phrasing, rhythm and inflection, she is the sculptor of her own raw material, under Chopra’s guidance.
And then there is Treat Williams as the smooth talker. He who was too bland as Stanley Kowalski in the TV production of A Streetcar Named Desire, is here taut, vivid, mesmerizing. Whether gyrating to rock music or leaning motionlessly against a door-frame, he maintains the requisite satanic allure. He injects this movie with the very element that most writers of books and movies about adolescents so studiously expunge from their work: the irrational.