I Think I Understand: An Appreciation of Laura Dern's Performance in Smooth Talk

by Matthew Eng

In the opening sequence of Joyce Chopra's 1985 Smooth Talk, three teenage girls wake from a late afternoon nap on the beach and hitch a ride in an older man's pickup, lest they be caught straying out of bounds by the mom assigned to fetch them from the mall. The coming-of-age drama that follows could conceivably follow any one of these characters. But it's Connie, the long-legged blonde in the group, whom we'll ultimately get to know. She's the one who insists on riding solo in the flatbed, who throws her hands up in the air as they hit the road and serenely watches the sun set, western wind in her hair, as the trio hightails it homeward. She's unforced and unburdened, just one of the girls.

She's also, unmistakably, Laura Dern. Chopra's first narrative feature, which earned the Grand Jury Prize at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival, marked the actress's first starring role after several years of supporting parts. A year before, Dern proved so convincing as a sightless, lovestruck adolescent in Peter Bogdanovich's Mask that when she showed up to shoot David Lynch's Blue Velvet not long after, her co-star Isabella Rossellini proceeded to guide Dern around the set, believing she was actually blind. (Barbra Streisand also allegedly asked Bogdanovich, Where in the world did you find a blind girl who can act? ) This story speaks to the immensity of Dern's dedication to her roles - a value ingrained in her by two consummate, Method-trained character-actor parents, Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern - but also to an ingenuity that only looks ingenuous, an artfulness under the cover of effortlessness.

No early effort of Dern's encapsulates this quality quite as vividly as Smooth Talk, a potent and perceptive adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' 1966 short story Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been? Part of a bumper crop of homegrown American indies helmed by women in the eighties, Smooth Talk heralded the arrival of an angular and energetic screen presence in its leading lady, who won the role days before production began after a friend of producer Martin Rosen spotted her on the beach in Malibu. Chopra's film follows Connie, its 15-year-old heroine, through a formative, hormonal summer in her small Northern California town before her sophomore year of high school. She feuds with her fed-up mom (Mary Kay Place) and starchy elder sister (Elizabeth Berridge). She dons low-cut tops, sneaks into a roadside joint, and rides in cars with boys for the first time, thrilling to their tender attention. And then, when Connie's home alone one afternoon, a hunky and increasingly hair-raising stranger (Treat Williams) shows up at her doorstep and insists on taking her for a drive in his gold convertible, the teenage dream of a gentleman caller warped into a waking nightmare.

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