Smooth talk

National Review, April 25, 1986 by JOhn Simon

AS IF THE imbecile high-school movies that inundate our screens weren't enough, we now must cope with the stupidity and dishonesty of a supposedly serious film about teenagers, Joyce Chopra's Smooth Talk. Worse yet, Vincent Canby of the New York Times and other reviewers have hailed this as a remarkable movie. And worst of all, Joyce Carol Oates, on whose story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the film is based, has published in the Times an apology for this travesty of her story, offering only the mildest, most wistful strictures concerning the disgraceful ending that turns allegory, Gothic horror, and tragedy into soap opera, and particularly mendacious and immoral soap opera at that.

The film, like the story, deals with 15-year-old Connie Wyatt during a school vacation. Her amiably superficial father is too happy to own the dilapidated Marin County farmhouse where the family now lives to worry about his daughters: June, 24, a dutiful drudge still living at home; and Connie, whose well-developed body is well ahead of her mind, and whose only interests are blasting the air with rock music and haunting beaches, movies, shopping malls, and hamburger joints with a couple of school chums in search of boys to neck with but not go all the way. Katherine, her mother, fitfully tries to paint the house, grouses at Connie for not helping in the least, and has one good line for her not-all-the-wayward daughter: "I look into your eyes, and all I see is trashy dreams."

The moment Connie, Laura, and Jill hit the shopping mall, Connie transforms herself: She sophisticates her hair, bedecks herself with lipstick and baubles, lowers her neckline to just this side of tartiness, and emerges as a precocious siren. The girls' dalliances at the mall with a variety of boys--those old and mean enough to be fled from on sight, those too young for anything but teasing, and those just right to go petting with only to escape when dress straps are tagged at--are well enough conveyed. Things go less well in the home scenes, where the mother-daughter bickering and sibling rivalry are much too perfunctory. This is not to be blamed on Miss Oates, but on the script by Tom Cole (who once wrote an honest, uncompromising play, Medal of Honor Rag), and on Miss Chopra's rote direction.

Less good yet are the hamburger-joint scenes, inept imitations of American Graffiti, where youthful couples, self-consciously posed, flirt in unison. Here Connie attracts the attention of Arnold Friend, a man over thirty, who apparently haunts these juvenile fleshpots in search of game. Miss Oates tells that she derived this character from the Pied Piper of Tucson, who, in the Arizona of the early Sixties, seduced and sometimes killed teenage girls with the tacit collusion of a circle of kids who never squealed on him.

On a hot summer day when Connie's exasperated mother slaps her, the girl refuses to accompany her family on a barbecue with relatives, preferring to laze about in and outside the house. Out of nowhere, up drives Arnold in his weirdly bedizened, gold-painted convertible, accompanied by an even weirder, silent pal. Introducing himself as "Arnold Friend--A. Friend," he jumps out of the car and, with his reflecting sunglasses and James Dean manner, proceeds to hypnotize and smooth-talk Connie into going on a ride with him, declaring himself to be her lover. Vaguely fascinated as well as scared and repelled, the girl retreats into the house, whose screen door she latches. Arnold remarks that he could easily tear through the door, but won't; it behooves Connie to come out to him. He cajoles, bullies, soothes, and veiledly threatens, and seems to know preternaturally much about Connie and her folks.

Here the hitherto mediocre film goes to pieces entirely. Clearly, the insidious power of the story lies in Arnold's not entering the house. Cinematically, though, it would have required genius to shoot the scene from both sides of a screen door. Yet Connie cannot unlatch it without falling out of character and killing the suspense. So, from one shot to the next, the door becomes unlatched (by itself, presumably), and Arnold enters the house to lean against the nearest inside wall. This sabotages the symbolism of the Maiden seeking out Death and his chariot--the original title of the story was "Death and the Maiden," and it ended with Connie getting into the car beside Arnold and driving off into a land wider and vaster than she had ever noticed before.

Not so the film. While Arnold's loathsome friend brutally riffles through Connie's records, we see, through cross-cutting, the car parked in a field; the camera pans to tall grass where something, anything may be happening. Presently, Arnold is driving Connie home. She gets out of the car in front of her house and, with a new-found authority, tells Arnold never to show his face again. The family has just arrived, too. How come they don't see Connie getting out of a strange car? How does Arnold's pal dodge them and get back in with Arnold? Why isn't the disorder he left noticed? Why is Connie, who went off barefoot, wearing running shoes now? But she's even more different on top: Graciously accepting her mother's apology, she responds with easy affection to all. The film ends with the sisters dancing to a record that Connie finds less absorbing now.