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Author:
Sheila Benson
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Sheila Benson was the principal Los Angeles Times film critic from 1981-91, following which she was their Critic At Large, writing on all aspects of the cultural life of that city. She also has written for Cinemania/msn.com for which she was chief film critic and many other papers.
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If critics can be said to have favorites -- and they have -- early on Sheila was a particular champion of independent films, as they were finding their voice and their power. As a result, her reports from the earliest days of Telluride, Toronto, Mill Valley and the Sundance festivals found their way into what was then the "Industry"-centric Times.
Moving online, she was chief film critic for Microsoft's invaluable Cinemania from its birth to its death, 4 ½ years later. She has also contributed coverage, essays and interviews to Interview, Elle, Premiere, Film Comment, Variety, the San Francisco Examiner, the Seattle Weekly, London Telegraph's Weekend magazine, Canada's Globe and Mail American Film Magazine and the New York Times.
Affiliated with the National Society of Film Critics, FIPRESCI (the International Film Critics Association) and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (1981-95), she has taught Critical Writing at UCLA and has been a jury member at the film festivals of Berlin, Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, Hawaii, Manila, Seattle, Aspen, Sundance/Park City, Taos, Banff and Palm Springs. In 1987, she was given the Vesta Award for Journalism for her contribution to the arts in Southern California. She wrote the narration for Chuck Workman's "The First 100 Years: A Celebration of American Film" for Bravo, and in 2004 wrote the critical essay for the DVD of Horton Foote's Tomorrow for Home Vision Entertainment.
Having moved to Washington in 1996, she now reviews for the Seattle Weekly.
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"Smooth Talk"
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 filmmakers remember, as clearly as Joyce Carol Oates did when she wrote the short story from which Smooth Talk was made.
They know the lies kids tell--good kids, just to give themselves breathing room (the story this was made from is
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Sound familiar?) They know small towns and shopping malls and tri-plexes; the jewelry that girls put on and the clothes they take off after they've left the house; the whole, elaborate moonscape of being 15. And they know the hot, dangerous high of attraction, of hinting at experience you don't have--and aren't sure you really want. Yet.
The setting of Smooth Talk is the unremarkable present. Summer vacation. Small town. Petaluma, north of San Francisco. The lowest ebb in relations between the family's youngest, tall, blonde 15-year old Connie (Laura Dern) and her youngish mother (Mary Kay Place), who alternately loves her and finds her the most selfish human being ever put on the planet. Connie has two best friends, one (Margaret Welch) a rather better friend than the other; a simple, affectionate father (Levon Helm) and a sister (Elizabeth Berridge) who, at 24, still lives at home and gives Connie, who loves her, fits. In other words, utter normalcy.
The three girlfriends cover for each other regularly,
"go to the same movie'' three nights running. In other words they hang out across the divided highway at the hamburger stand, where they flirt, tease, dance a little, and try as much as they can to put the ignominy of being 15 behind them.
What the filmmakers also understand is that there's no one in the life of a girl quite like the hard guy--the one with the black shoes, the leather jacket or the cowboy boots. Talk to any woman and watch her face change as she remembers that boy. In Smooth Talk he's Arnold Friend (Treat Williams) maybe a little dangerous, maybe more than that; a man, not a boy, who hangs out at the high school
kids' hamburger stand, a smooth talker.
He watches Connie, gawkiness smoothed out as she dances for a second by the juke box, oblivious to him. But as she leaves, Friend makes his signature gesture: one finger extended like a gun, he drawls,
"I'm watchin' you.''
And within days, without violence, with nothing ever overt on the screen, Smooth Talk becomes perhaps the most devastating rite-of-passage history imaginable.
It is director Joyce Chopra's first feature; she has been known before as the director of documentaries. Her work with her actors is a matter of delicacy, placement, nuance and shade. It's an inside job, everyone to do with the film seems to share the same tender understanding of this material. Where screenwriter Tom Cole has added to the original, haunting story (which is almost all the dialogue except the crucial duet), he has written scenes with their own precise imagery, as strong as
Oates' own.
What makes Laura Dern's performance the event that it is--one of the finest, most sustained and most shatteringly observed we've had this year--is that it's rare to have this variety of insights about adolescence from an actress so nearly that age herself. Williams, her partner in the film's hypnotic duet of eroticism and spellbinding, is the very best he has been in years. If he seems to be posturing at the beginning, doing James Dean, doing a young Brando, it turns out to be exactly right. The depth of Arnold Friend's sincerity makes you, at last, understand the girls who fell for crazy Charlie Manson.
Mary Kay Place makes clear the dilemma of a caring mother during this minefield period, where any impulsive, affectionate gesture can bring about an anguished,
"Mo-ther, please!" Many of the film's songs are by its music director, James Taylor. James Glennon did its glowingly fine camerawork and Patrick Dodd its supple editing, and while appreciation is going around, we should make mention of Martin Rosen (Watership Down), who produced
"Smooth Talk'' and American Playhouse and its executive producer Lindsay Law, for whom the film was originally made.
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