Smooth Talk

TV Guide Magazine by

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.

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

Joyce Chopra's independent feature plays uncomfortably like two movies jammed into one: the first is a slow, exaggeratedly naturalistic portrait of teenage alienation in the shopping mall culture of California, the second is a violent, stylized gothic shocker. Both films have their modest qualities; it's just that Chopra hasn't found an intelligible transition between the two very different approaches.

Newsweek by David Ansen

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]

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

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]

Washington Post by Paul Attanasio

Despite a nice performance by Dern, Smooth Talk never gets better than its good intentions. Adapted from a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, the movie is awfully short-storyish -- it meanders through its slight narrative, and the dialogue can be stilted and literary (it's meant to be read, not heard).

Washington Post by Rita Kempley

Not just another youth movie, but a deft dramatization of a Joyce Carol Oates story adapted by a couple of documentary filmmakers in their feature debut.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The movie is also uncanny in what it does with its last three shots. I watched them, and could not believe so much could be implied so simply. Leave the movie before it's over, and you miss almost everything, because what Connie does at the very end of the film is necessary. It makes "Smooth Talk" the story of the process of life, instead of just a sad episode.

Los Angeles Times by Sheila Benson

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.

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

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