Smooth Talk

A remarkably fine film about the muddle of emotions that separates the child from the adult.

The shiveringly memorable Smooth Talk may be the first film to get adolescence in America right, down to the last, delicate seismographic tremor. What it knows about the age will scare adults to death, because these film makers remember , as clearly as Joyce Carol Oates did when she wrote the short story from which “Smooth Talk” was made.

Nearly everything that is right about Smooth Talk would have been impossible to obtain by conventional Hollywood film- manufacture. The film's appeal, including that of the performances, is in nuance and intermediate shades. That appeal is considerable, another reminder of the possibilities of the American independent film. [9 May 1986, p.43]

Here, as elsewhere, one senses that the images are being asked to carry rather more metaphorical weight than they are able to bear.

Some viewers may welcome the drama's lack of resolution as an honest response to the mysteries of adolescence, while others may consider it a moral cop-out. [10 March 1986, p.33]

But Smooth Talk, alas, is two movies, and the parts don't mesh. What begins as subdued, plotless realism -- everything up to Arnold's late entrance -- then lurches into Gothic melodrama. Arnold is a literary conceit, Connie is real: thus their portentous mating ritual seems more contrived than inevitable. Smooth Talk feels like an anecdote that's been stretched out of shape. [24 March 1986, p.77]

SMOOTH TALK is trying to talk to a 1980s generation by using 1960s dialog. Faithfully adapted from a 1970 Joyce Carol Oates short story, the film's attitudes are better suited to that era than to the present. Dern (daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd), however, is the one element that makes SMOOTH TALK.