STRAIGHT TALK: Blu-ray (Hollywood Pictures, 1992) Kino Lorber

Delicious Dolly Parton doles out common sense to the lovelorn in director, Barnet Kellman’s Straight Talk (1992) – a rather forgettable fluff and nonsense whose singular salvation is Parton’s perk and plucky dance hall hostess come radio psychologist, Shirlee Kenyon. The original poster art for this picture had Parton wistfully seated on a large pumpkin, gazing at the stars. I am still trying to figure out the Cinderella-esque reference here, as Straight Talk never gets transformed from the proverbial sow’s ear into a silk purse. Much as Parton tries, and believe me – she does! – the baked-in hallmarks of her good-natured gal with a twist never entirely come across in anything but a few homespun zingers. When the Craig Bolotin/Patricia Resnick screenplay paints itself into a narrative corner, as it frequently does, Kellman merely falls back on a series of montages set to another pop ditty penned (occasionally with an assist from Bill Owens) and sung with intrepid self-confidence by Parton. Although Straight Talk is not a musical, there are no less than 10 songs in it, the best and bounciest, the picture’s title tune, repurposed several times throughout the story.  I have to say, the soundtrack to Straight Talk is far more entertaining than the movie, badly to bungle its ‘feel good’ on a series of false starts as Shirlee dumps her dead-beat common law, Steve (Michael Madsen), leaves the hicks and sticks, and begins anew in the windy city of Chicago, catching the eye of newshound, Jack Russell (James Woods) and the heart of frazzled radio exec’, Alan Riegert (Griffin Dunne) after both he and his boss, Gene Perlman (Philip Bosco) mistake her as the pop psychologist Riegert had hired, sight unseen, to fill in for another failed talk show host. Riegert figures out the mistake first. However, owing to the rating’s bonanza bolstered by Shirlee’s no-nonsense approach to life, Riegert does everything to keep Shirlee’s true identity a secret from the world.

This ought to have led to a series of clever mis-directions illustrating how Shirlee narrowly skirts the issue of her faked ‘credentials’ as a psychiatrist. In fact, there is one rather amusing vignette where Shirlee, whose meteoric rise to fame on the radio earns her an invite on a local TV talk show, is momentarily sabotaged by its host, Zim Zimmerman (Jay Thomas) who totes a legit psychiatrist, Dr. Erdman (Spalding Gray) in order to illustrate her lack of experience to his audience when dealing with an impromptu random caller into the program, coping with a philandering spouse. But the plan backfires when Erdman offers up some traditional psycho-babble, attempting to lay blame for the affair at the wife’s feet while Shirlee, having already been burned by love, faces the problem square on, spreading a little common sense that gets Zim’s audience to its feet in applause. Otherwise, Straight Talk spends far too much of its slender 91-minutes worrying about its secondary dead-in-the-water ‘romance’ between Shirlee and Jack, who cannot decide whether he wants to legitimately date the hottest ticket in town or merely expose her for the fraud that she is to his editor-in-chief, Milo Jacoby (a woefully underused Jerry Orbach). Part of the immense disappointment derived from Straight Talk is it casts such talented folk as Orbach in disposable bits, so slight and unprepossessing, any newbee-off-the-bus could have filled the part. Also cast adrift are Charles (Roger Rabbitt) Fleischer as Tony, the programmer of Shirlee’s show, Paula Newsom as the station’s front desk receptionist, Ellen, and Teri Hatcher as Jack’s ex, Janice.

Straight Talk really has nothing to say about life or love. That’s a pity since it also happens to be the picture’s modus operandi. Woods and Parton, while technically at the top of their game as individual performers, never come together as rom/com sparring partners on the bumpy road to redemption and love. Their initial ‘cute meet’ – he, misinterpreting Shirlee’s brutal attempts to save her last ten dollars from going over the side of a bridge in downtown Chicago as a suicide attempt – is heavy-handed camp at best, even more weighted down when Shirlee, having ditched Jack for a hot meal, comes in contact with Janice at a local diner and gives the romantically ailing young Miss a bit of free advice about pitching her work-a-holic boyfriend to the curb, before realizing he and Jack are one in the same. From this inauspicious debut, Shirley manages to land a job as a front desk screener at the radio station. A wrong turn on route to the bathroom leads her into a programming booth where she is inadvertently mistaken as a pop psychologist late for her first day of work. Aside: Bolotin and Resnick might have had some fun here keeping Shirlee and the actual shrink for hire cleverly separated as one attempts to discredit the other for being the interloper into this too-too convenient contrivance. But instead, we never meet the ‘other’ radio doc, leaving Shirlee to cover the beat, awkwardly fielding questions from the barrage of first-time callers. At show’s end, an apoplectic Riegert fires Shirlee for being a fake, but is then forced to reconsider when Perlman concludes the show’s ratings have topped out, making it an instant hit with audiences.

Painted into a corner by his own design, Riegert now sets about to flimflam his boss and the audience by plumping up a fictional bio for Shirlee, whom he rechristens as Dr. Shirlee and promotes through an aggressive billboard and interview campaign as the next big thing to hit the airwaves. The ruse works and Shirlee is quickly – and effortlessly transformed from country bumpkin into class-A advice guru as Jack inquisitively looks on. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Jack makes his pilgrimage to Shirlee’s hometown and quietly unearths, until her instant celebrity, she was a ‘no-nothing’ dance hall hostess thrice married and divorced from the same man, before hooking up with her common-law and his best pal, most recently to have treated her abominably. And no, the boorish and rather brainless Steve is not done yet. In fact, he has all but decided Shirlee’s promise to make good after leaving him deserves a come-down. To this end, Steve arrives in Chicago, decks Jack and makes a half-ass effort to expose Shirlee for who she truly is to her boss.

It’s the conventional and mechanical writing in Straight Talk that really wears thin, long before the movie has worn out its 91-minute runtime. Jack’s struggle to come to terms with Shirlee’s homespun goodness (the very foundation of Parton’s entire movie career). Despite his protestations about being a hardcore journalist with a pit bull’s attitude toward scooping a juicy story, Jack is never anything less than empathetic towards Shirlee’s plight in life. Even after learning the truth about her imperfect relationships, he still wants to try and be the one and only guy in her new life. This, of course, dovetails into the foregone conclusion of the movie itself; the big scene, where Shirlee, having suffered an attack of conscience, now reveals to all – including her 40 million fans – she is not a pop psychologist, and profusely, and tearfully, apologizes for leading everyone on. Big surprise: the grand reconciliation, Perlman – hardly wounded by this revelation, and forgiving to a fault, takes control of the radio program on a crusade to get loyalists to honk their horns at midnight for ‘Dr. Shirlee’ in support for all the good advice she has provided to them. And, surprise/surprise – Jack and Shirlee find one another on precisely the same bridge at midnight. He begs forgiveness, and, without much effort, she lets bygones be bygones. Big helicopter tracking pullback and roll credits to a reprise of Parton’s title tune.

Straight Talk is a tired warhorse of a plot, plucked, pickled and presented to us as a fresh twist on an old favorite. Except that it’s not, and nothing Parton or Woods do here can entirely rescue this movie from its pedestrian ‘just the facts, ma’am’ approach to a severely dated chestnut. As already mentioned, Parton does manage to get in a few congenial retorts along the way. Not having seen Straight Talk for decades, I still remembered Shirlee’s playfully tart reply to a radio caller, “Oh, get down off the cross, honey. Somebody needs the wood!” Cute line. Doesn’t save the movie. And neither does Dolly’s unpretentious common sense, as when she returns the pink Mercedes bequeathed by her bosses for resurrecting their station from ratings oblivion, reminding them, “Nobody needs a sixty-thousand-dollar car. I’m not really a Mercedes. I’m just a plain ole’ Pontiac…maybe a Chevy.” The only believable character in this movie is, in fact, Parton’s pseudo-psychologist, but mostly due to Parton’s built-in persona, which – genuine or not – she has managed to package over the years as her authentic self and sell with casual class, as commonplace and comfortable as a box of cornflakes on the breakfast table. We love Dolly Parton. But this is far from her finest hour on the screen. After watching Straight Talk again, I was compelled to seek out the soundtrack, quite pleased by the wonderful toe-tapping efforts Parton has put forth here. Alas, watching the likes of the late Jerry Orbach and Philip Bosco read 4-lines in 10 scenes to establish their characters is painful. These were talented men who had so much better to offer then what each has been given here. 

Straight Talk has been out on Blu-ray for a while via Kino Lorber’s alliance with Buena Vista Distribution and their ownership of Hollywood Pictures, who produced this one back in 1992 and, even more miraculously, reaped some rewards for their ‘efforts’. Straight Talk earned only mixed reviews, but opened an impressive No. 4 in North America (and No. 1 in the UK), grossing $21,202,099. The results in 1080p are hardly as good. Obviously, the elements provided to Kino herein have not been remastered or even culled from an original camera negative. The image is uniformly soft, depriving us of the finer nuances in Peter Sova’s cinematography. Fine details lag, and colors are on the muted/dull side. Grain has either been scrubbed or homogenized by the lack of attention paid to the print master, containing some glaring age-related damage in spots. There’s also so light bleeding around the edges of the frame. This is a forgettable effort of a truly disposable movie. The 2.0 DTS stereo audio is barely adequate, and, intermittently sounds muffled. For a movie of this vintage, this is unacceptable – period! Extras are limited to an audio commentary by Barnet Kellman who really does not have all that much to say. We also get a careworn theatrical trailer. Bottom line: Straight Talk is for Parton completionists only. The rest can step aside and allow their memories of pop-psycho-babble ‘talk radio’ in its prime to endure without the bucolic ‘aw shucks’.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2

VIDEO/AUDIO

2.5

EXTRAS

1