Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: Antlers, a horror movie adapted from a story by Nick Antosca, is not hitting theaters. In its absence, we’re looking back on other movies based on short stories.
Smooth Talk (1985)
Even when filmmakers heed the advice that short stories are often better-suited to adaptation than novels, they tend to work from popular or hooky genre pieces, rather than entries from the contemporary literary canon. (In other words, there are more movies adapted from stories by Stephen King than, say, Tobias Wolff or Amy Bloom.) Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk makes the bold decision to adapt the heavily anthologized and highly economical Joyce Carol Oates story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” into a feature, and it’s an example of both the fruitfulness and trickiness of this process.
Because the Oates story is essentially split between a lot of description and a single extended scene, Smooth Talk has been referred to as a loose adaptation. Wouldn’t it have to be, to expand 15 pages or so into 90 minutes? Yes and no; Chopra’s movie contains many full scenes that are not present in the story, and there are contextual and aesthetic changes involved from filming a mid-’60s story in the mid-’80s while keeping the action contemporaneous. (Oates surely didn’t envision her original work as a harrowing glimpse at mall culture, though it fits surprisingly well into the story’s texture.) At the same time, nearly every detail offered in Oates’ prose is carefully incorporated into Tom Cole’s screenplay, as descriptions become dialogue and character becomes its own form of plot.
The character here is Connie (Laura Dern), a 15-year-old on summer vacation who wants to escape her humdrum life and has limited means of doing so. Connie and her two best friends get rides to the mall, and while they spend a little time ogling boys, going to the movies, and making a scene in various stores, just as often they hitchhike over to a nearby beach or doll themselves up to cruise for guys at a burger joint after dark. Connie’s parents Katherine (Mary Kay Place) and Harry (Levon Helm) may not know the specifics of her daily activities, but her mom in particular has her suspicions. The mother and daughter spend a lot of time seething at each other, and in dramatizing a relationship only described in the story, Chopra and Cole perfectly capture the kinds of bitter, formless fights teenagers have with their parents.
Outside her home, Connie experiments with feeling more grown-up, which involves playing a kind of hormonal lottery with pitiless young men. A few of the teenage boys she flirts with are abashed, most are older and more aggressive, and plenty seem outright predatory. The most unnerving is the decidedly non-teenage Arnold Friend (Treat Williams), who lurks in her peripheral vision and eventually makes contact. Their extended scene together, closely adapted from the story, gives Smooth Talk an unusual structure; it captures slice-of-life moments for an hour before sinking into an uneasy psychological set piece. Chopra does her best to make the hour of slow build-up feel natural, with evocative master shots and a well-observed sense of teenage listlessness. A young Dern is ideally cast as a teenager who yearns to be a little bit older. She looms over her friends with her height, only to turn gawky at key moments.
One reason Smooth Talk might be classified as a “loose” adaptation despite its faithfulness is that it appends an extra 10 minutes or so of screen time onto the haunting, doomy final moments of the original story. Oates herself focused on this change when writing about the adaptation process for a New York Times essay she wrote shortly after the film’s release. (“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is so widely reprinted that this piece has turned up in multiple literature textbooks alongside it.) She’s ultimately magnanimous about the differences: “I would fiercely defend the placement of a semicolon in one of my novels but I would probably have deferred in the end to Joyce Chopra’s decision” to end the story a different way. And while anyone familiar with the original story will probably be unable to look at Smooth Talk entirely on its own terms, the interplay between the film and its source material gives the former both the sharpness of experience and elusiveness of memory.
Availability: Smooth Talk is not officially streaming anywhere, though there is an HD rip of it up on YouTube. It’s also available on both DVD and Blu-ray through Amazon.
45 Comments
I’ve seen this film and it’s definitely a good look at 80’s mall culture. The line I remember from it is the Mom saying to Dern “I look at you. I look right in your eyes… and all I see are a bunch of trashy daydreams.”
Yes! And that line, I had to double-check, is *straight* from the prose in the story (which I hadn’t read through since college). And it’s kind of a risky move to transpose description into actual dialogue in a movie, but this movie makes it work.
I saw it on PBS long ago, and it was the first thing I’d seen Laura Dern in. She was fantastic, able to shift gears between moods in a really convincing way.
“Young Laura Dern”, “80’s Mall Culture”
God do I love that movie…one of my first memories of Night Flight.
Really underrated film.
Is this the story where the girl’s home alone and the guy rolls up with his friend and tries to convince her to come out of the house in increasingly uncomfortable ways? If so: shit, they made an entire movie out of that?
Baby, it’s hot inside.
yep, that’s the one.
wait, this movie has Levon Helm in it? James Taylor as music director??
Yes and yes.
That poster might be the single most 80s thing I have seen in a long time.
The way Laura Dern is looming over Treat Williams it looks like she is 16 feet tall and ready to pop his head off like she’s pulling a grape off a stem.
“Attack of the 16 Foot Laura Dern”? I would see that movie.
We watched this in a literature class in college.
It’s an interesting experiment, but it’s hard to justify the $2.4 million or so they spent given it’s so very not commercial.
But that makes the ending even more strange.
As you mention, the movie is extremely faithful to it’s source material up until the end, but it’s arguable that the indefinite end is the most important part of the material.
Adding on a “happy” ending nails down the story to one interpretation but doesn’t solve the problem that the movie was not going to draw audiences. The ending was not going to turn this introspective production, more like a filmed version of a play, make money.
Given the inevitable commercial failure, it probably would have been better to keep the original end. But I suppose, if you’re thinking like that, it probably shouldn’t have been made, unless the producers intended to lose $2.4 million dollars (maybe more).
But their loss is our gain. Whether or not the film is great, it is interesting.
Do you evaluate the fiscal responsibility of every movie you see??
I do. But I’ve also got a massive lease on a Los Angeles house designed by Richard Meier, so. . . .
Oh hussshhh, you smooth talker, you.
2.4 million, in the era it was made, WAS a very small and intimate movie you realize….it would be the equivalent of the small sums spent in the early 70’s where you were trying to make art and hoped the film caught on and made a ton of money back.
If you are looking for more Laura Dern, here is a great place to get you started.
The opening paragraph of this review reminded me of a college creative writing professor I had who cited this story as her “the one everyone should learn how to write based on,” and took a very snooty attitude toward any students who contemplated lowering ourselves to mere genre work…
You know, I’m not terribly sympathetic to the ways that literary fiction, something hardly anyone makes money doing, oppresses and denigrates poor ol’ underappreciated and extremely popular genre fiction.
What an unprovokedly snotty, condescending response.The absurdity of the attitude held by the professor in question is in the notion that “literary” and “genre” were mutually exclusive categories, which they absolutely are not. Works in any genre can contain all of the narrative and thematic depth and complexity associated with the “literary,” and every work of narrative fiction – “literary” or otherwise – can be classified according to the standards of some genre.For the most part, in my personal experience, blanket dismissal of genre fiction (which was not something I read into your original article, it was simply something I was reminded of by it) comes from readers/critics who reject any but the most literal and sign-posted of “depth” in a work, and therefore favor works devoid of any but the most obvious of metaphorical or expressionistic content.
I’ve never felt ashamed of expressing my worldview in largely symbolic and exaggerated terms (which I’m hardly doing in the interest of financial gain, as you might gather from the fact that I’m not a famous and financially successful writer), and I feel sorry for anyone who’s ever been tormented out of creating works that mean something to them personally because of that kind of pretense (which, once again, I was not accusing you of, so I’m not sure why you felt compelled to be such a dick to me).
Sorry, I misunderstood your association between your professor and my opening paragraph. But at the same time, I wasn’t trying to insult you so much as say that I don’t necessarily disagree with your professor’s general assessment. Of course, she may have been rude or condescending about it, and may well have been a total unwarranted snob about all kinds of good writing. But I find a lot of genre/popular fiction fans and authors alike tend to get their backs up whenever someone implies that yes, some literary fiction is much better writing on a sentence level, and yes, they’re being asked to study a 15-page short story where not a lot happens from a plot point of view. That may not have been you! But this story isn’t exactly wildly obtuse. It’s taught everywhere. So I find it sort of funny that you seem to associate the story with snobbery.
It’s not that genre fiction can’t be literary. If anything, it’s more impressive when a book can combine amazing writing and genre-level imagination and compelling plotting, because it’s so hard to do. At the same time, I don’t think that people who write in the mode of Oates or Amy Bloom or Tobias Wolff or Aimee Bender or George Saunders or whoever are avoiding genre trappings out of some kind of respectability torment. I mean, maybe, but it’s so hard to find sustained success in that area, and there are sooooo many people trying their hand at genre/popular fiction, that it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who really loves writing being discouraged by a prof who doesn’t care for sci-fi and says to study closely one of the most-anthologized short stories of the last 60 years or so. Just as a lot of quasi-literary writers could probably benefit from studying the structure and plotting of a good Elmore Leonard novel, a lot of budding Leonards could probably stand to study more short stories where not that much happens.I mean, I try to read a bunch of different stuff. I read comics and YA alongside my precious short story collections (and when I’m pressed for time, WAY more comics, ha). I’ve also read submissions for a literary magazine, which means I’ve read more terrible quasi-literary fiction than anyone should have to! My intent was not to shame you, and again, I’m sorry I came across that way. I’m just very wary of the Jennifer Weiner-type arguments about how her wildly popular books ought to also get a lot more critical attention, too. Reminds me so much of people commenting on A.V. Club end-of-the-year lists asking how we could POSSIBLY leave off Avengers: Endgame.
Thank you for a very thorough and thoughtful reply!Honestly, high art vs. low art arguments are an area where whatever side somebody plants themselves on, I tend to come across like I’m arguing from the opposite, when in fact my stance is more, “This argument is absurd! These categories are permeable and in no way mutually exclusive!”I agree that “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is far from obtuse or pretentious; in fact, I think it was a very accessible example of the kind of writing that professor was trying to teach. It’s unfortunate that I now associate it with her smug attitude.And I agree with you that, “some literary fiction is much better writing on a sentence level.” But some is an essential word there. There’s plenty of writing in critic-friendly genres that is absolutely abysmal. I’m a pretty big believer in Sturgeon’s Revelation; certainly 90% of genre fiction is crap, but so is 90% of “contemporary fiction.” My perspective is not that all genre fiction needs to be treated as great art; it’s that artistic merit isn’t inherently determined by relationship to genre one way or the other.Which wasn’t a claim I think you’re making, so I hope we can agree that we’re not really disagreeing about anything.
Oates has written a fair amount of genre so she would not have liked that professor’s take. Several Gothic novels, some noir detectives and at least one ghost/ evil spirit one that I remember offhand.
Hadn’t seen it but looked up the story, my favorite bit from the Wiki: “Considerable academic analysis has been written about the story, with scholars divided on whether it is intended to be taken literally or as allegory. Several writers focus on the series of numbers written on Friend’s car, which he indicates are a code of some sort, but which is never explained:“Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey,” Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn’t think much of it.Literary scholars have interpreted this series of numbers as different Biblical references,[5][8] as an underlining of Friend’s sexual deviancy,[9] or as a reference to the ages of Friend and his victims.” I mean guys, really, nobody picked this one up, like right away? The “deviancy” guy maybe got it. Having found the story and read it now, definitely something allegorical going on, something supernatural. The story gets really weird and sensory at the end, and the details sound like something from a horror novel. I’d say it was Manson related, but it came out too early. Interesting stuff.
It wasn’t Manson related; it was inspired by this dude:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Schmid
Yeah, I found that later. Very strange. Explains a lot of the weird descriptions of Friend at the end (though I think the surrealist nature of it is also trying to make him very alien and nearly inhuman. It felt like reading a Lovecraft story, when the protagonist starts to have their sense of reality torn by the cosmic nature of what they’re seeing).
I took a film studies class in my undergrad, and this was one of the movies that I still remember. We were required to read Joyce Chopra’s story too, and I thought the film perfectly captured the essence of what Chopra conveyed.As young girls we’re always in a hurry to grow up, never once considering the full consequences that we could incur. For some of us it’s more serious than a grown man who passively twists us to get what he wants, but we all learn all the same.
*obligatory “Remove the Rs from his name and look what you get!” post*
Oates’ story, and the film, were inspired by killer The Pied Piper of Tucson, who used to take the high school kids on the strip on Speedway, let them drink. Wore a fake mole and stuffed his combat boots with rolled up newspaper. Growing up there, I kind of got obsessed and spent hours at the U of A library printing microfiche.
I read this story during a period when I read a lot of Oates’ stuff, and I ultimately had to stop because the implied violence in her stories sickened me. I remember one featured the sexual abuse of a hermaphroditic child. She faces up to realities most of us can’t bear to look at. I never thought there was any ambiguity about “Where are You Going…” I had been a teenager whose tight shirts tended to attract unwanted attention. This story gave me nightmares
I was scrolling down, saw young Laura Dern and thought “Oh, cool, they’re doing Rambling Rose…”, scrolled down further and was like “No, it’s Smooth Talk! No one talks about Smooth Talk! No one ever remembers Smooth Talk!”I FLOVE this movie! I saw it in ‘86 or so and was riveted. I remember her making out with a guy and pausing, gently pushing him away, and finally saying “I’m not used to feeling this…excited” which I thought was so…on point, maybe a little too self-insightful for a 15 year old but I loved it. And then that whole effed, EFFED up scene between Arnold Friend and Connie—it was so confusing but so…compelling, and I loved that you couldn’t figure it out. I hate it when scripts overexplain. Leave a little room for mystery.And I love the use of James Taylor’s “Handyman.” Just beautiful. “They’ll come runnin’ to me-e-e-e-God, I love this part!” (or whatever she said). Just a great, great movie.
getting some heavy vaporwave feel from that soundtrack
Watch This! movie that isn’t available anywhere! Thanks, AV Club. Very helpful!
I mean, if you have indeed thrown your physical media player of choice in the trash (because this movie is, as mentioned, available on DVD and Blu-ray!), you might have noticed that we linked to a free rip of the movie that’s currently on YouTube, almost as if we’re trying *especially* hard to get people to watch it!
Don’t get your panties in a bind, sugar tits
Or, instead of saying this, you could admit you were wrong.
No. Because a) the only available version is an illegal copy and b) eat a dick. It was an internet comment made months ago. 🖕🖕🖕
As I said above, the movie is available on physical discs, so that’s an awfully narrow (by which I mean ENTIRELY INCORRECT) definition of “available version.” It was also a comment made one month ago. I guess you got the internet part right. But the important thing is that your feedback is enormously insightful and will be passed along to management right away.
And I’ll just come back again and say who fucking cares, you absolute putz. I’ll be you respond to this too. Because you’re INSECURE. now stfu loser
My apologies. I’m angry at the way this site was ruined so I take it out on the mediocre writers they saddled us readers with. It’s not your fault.
I’ve been writing here for seven years; I feel like that’s more than enough time to part with the site if it’s upsetting you this much. But, yeah, I know, the OLD A.V. Club would never dare… recommend a movie that is not hard to find at all? Honestly I’m still not sure what you’re angry about but I hope you’re feeling better these months later.
Sorry you’re this fucking sensitive about the mild criticism I forwarded. Get a grip, motherfuck. LET IT GO