Smooth Talk is a Bumpy Adaptation

Connie Wyatt (Laura Dern) in Smooth Talk (1985)

I watched this film last night and am still indifferent to it. Knowing that writer Joyce Carol Oates drew inspiration from Charles Schmid's Tucson murders when writing her short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" This fact painted a different picture for me, and with that “inspiration” in mind, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Official Movie Poster for Smooth Talk

Smooth Talk is a 1985 film starring a young Laura Dern as Connie Wyatt, adapted from Oates's short story. This adaptation was directed by Joyce Chopra, and the screenplay was written by Tom Cole. At first, it follows the same patterns of any coming-of-age film, but its last fifteen minutes left me feeling conflicted. And as an adaptation, I haven't made up my mind yet as how to rank it.

When I say I haven’t made up my mind yet, I am primarily referring to the two different endings: the short story and the film.

The short story ends when Connie gets in the car, so we as readers are unsure weather she lives or not. Whereas in the film, we see Arnold Friend (Treat Miller) drop Connie off after un unknown amount of time. Connie the wanders around her house, interacts with her family, and mentions nothing of what had occurred.

On the one hand, I’m glad I wasn’t left wondering whether or not Connie lived. Still, I think the ambiguity of her original ending really drives home the point she was trying to make because the loss of life and the loss of innocence are two completely different yet still tragic “consequences” to her actions. 

I think the intent of letting Connie live at the end was because if they flipped the switch like that and then rolled the credits, audiences would've felt genre whiplash from a coming-of-age to a true crime, so this was the next best thing. 

I think adapting this short story, and short stories in general, has the benefit of how little material there is to work with. When adapting full-fledged novels, directors and writers must choose which material to cut when adapting. However, when Joyce Chopra and Tom Cole received the script, they had the opposite problem: they had to add to the material to make for a more compelling film. In general, I think that’s why Hollywood chooses contemporary or short books when it wants to adapt something for the screen. (That’s another tangent I could make.)

Perhaps Chopra and Cole really wanted us to show how her “drive” with Arnold really changed her. It is a complete 180 from how she was the rest of the film. Before, she was boisterous and bold and reckless with her well-being, but after, she is quiet and a little submissive, appearing just very… drained. 

Connie Wyatt (Laura Dern) talks with Arnold Friend (Treat Williams)

I don’t want to say Chopra had it easy, but I think she did. I think a 32-page short story with only a handful of different scenes gives her a lot of material to work with and to take into her own hands. Overall, I think the only big challenge would've been that last scene with her and Arnold; it went on a little long, from a viewer's perspective, at least. They could've either increased the pacing or cut some of the back-and-forth, and it would've still had the same impact.