Smooth Talk

A deceptively powerful picture based on the Joyce Carol Oates story "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been" about an adolescent girl playing frightening, exhilarating games with her evolving sexuality. The lovely Laura Dern (“Mask” and “Blue Velvet”) is like a flower opening up to the sun, but as you watch her you become deeply afraid that something terrible is going to happen to her. (One of the great things about the picture is that at the end something DOES happen to her, but it is not clear if it is terrible or not.) She is unhappy but not quite sure why; she longs desperately for things that she cannot clearly define. The opening of the picture could be any beach blanket bingo teen slop, with the three girlfriends running off to the beach when they are supposed to be at the mall. Then the picture rapidly turns deeper and darker--this is one of the most deeply colored films in terms of mood and perception that I have ever seen, and all the hues are rich but somber. Ambiguity abounds. The picture contains one of the most wrenching portrayals of mother/daughter conflicts I have seen onscreen (Mary Kay Place does a nice job as the mother).

Treat (“Price of the City,” among others) Williams is exceptional in the small (by screen time) but crucial role of Arnold Friend, the older seducer who comes to play such a pivotal role in Dern's life. He is at once attractive and menacing; to the viewer he appears primally amoral, but you can see what it is that fascinates Dern--he is everything that she both fears and desires. The long setpiece scene in which Williams entices Dern out of the house is fascinating in an extremely languorous way; it’s like watching a snake and a mongoose. Violence and terror seems to be just offscreen, kept there by the thinnest of restraints. But it is remarkable how little actually transpires in this picture. Truly much of what occurs is IMPLIED, but while that usually (to me at least) denigrates a picture, here it is the essence of the picture, and it works extremely well. Watching this picture is almost like watching a picture being painted; it slowly comes into focus. And yet the film is never boring, it draws you into it inexorably. At the end you are left knowing that something has happened to Dern, something profound and solemn. There is less of the lilt in her step, the shadow of sadness and the bitterness of wisdom dance around the edges of her face, and still she wishes to keep the power of this new-found knowledge to herself, perhaps until she has assimilated it, put it in its place. "What happened?" her sister asks. "I don't know. Maybe nothing happened," is the reply, and it may be true. She DOESN'T know and may not even be sure something did. There is something primordial here that reaches deeply back into our collective memory. Something about the time when we first lost the blush of innocence, when the petals fell from our eyes and we acquired the ability to see the darkness around us; the shadow thrown by every light, when we saw that all in the world is not pastel pleasantries, that it is instead composed of frightening complexities of which we can barely conceive. This picture impacts like the proverbial velvet hammer, and the blow strikes when we see that what it is really about is the birth of bitterness.