Is Smiley Face a character portrait of a disillusioned ex-economics major who uses bong rips to dull the edges of her late-capitalist hellscape? Or is it an outrageous weed comedy, a dumb-funny farce designed for Visine-carrying 17-year-olds to watch on the couch with their friends? The magic of Smiley Face, I realize now, is that it succeeds at being both.
I’m also surprised by how much affection I feel for Jane, a social misfit with an unassumingly sophisticated imagination who struggles between the urge to conform and a more primal desire to circumvent the messy mechanics of modern life altogether.
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Revisiting it now, I’m increasingly struck by the skillfulness of the filmmaking, by Araki’s decision to accentuate the interiority of Jane’s experience by framing Faris’ face in a series of long close-ups, by the playfulness with which he flash-cuts to a memory or daydream, and by the way he photographs Los Angeles with a sun-bleached expressionism that brings to mind Jean Baudrillard’s description of the city as a “network of endless, unreal circulation.” into one of 21st century cinema’s most lovable f*ck-ups.Īs a perennially stoned teenage viewer, I responded to Smiley Face mostly for its jokes, laughing at Jane’s relatable ability to transform even the simplest task into a paranoia-inducing ordeal. But Smiley Face’s MVP is irrefutably Faris, whose extraordinarily committed performance transcends stoner slapstick, turning Jane F. It also has to do with the solid work from the movie’s supporting cast, which in addition to Lynch and Masterson also includes Adam Brody as a weed dealer with cringey white-boy dreads and John Krasinski as Brevin Ericson, Jane’s dweeby lovesick admirer. Some of that has to do with the fact that shows like Broad City, which Smiley Face predates by seven years, have since normalized the female-led weed comedy, a sub-subgenre that likely didn’t have as much top-down support in that stretch of years between Harold and Kumar and Pineapple Express. The result is a hilarious all-in-one-day misadventure that rivals After Hours, Run Lola Run, and Uncut Gems in terms of its sheer narrative escalation.ĭespite its lukewarm commercial reception, the cult of Smiley Face has grown significantly over the past decade and a half. The rest of the film tracks Jane as she attempts to complete a comically short to-do list, which includes buying more weed to bake replacement cupcakes, meeting a casting agent (Jane Lynch) for an audition, and paying her way-overdue electric bill in person. When she realizes that they were actually pot cupcakes, she skyrockets to another plane of intoxication.
(Anna Faris) who gets stoned and eats a whole batch of cupcakes that her judgmental roommate (Danny Masterson) was saving for a sci-fi convention. He fell in love with the Smiley Face script, which was written by Dylan Haggerty and follows an underemployed actor named Jane F.
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The movie was directed by New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki, who wanted to follow-up his 2004 film Mysterious Skin - a tender, spellbinding drama about the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse on two small-town teenagers - with something a little less intense. After debuting to mostly positive reviews at Sundance, Smiley Face was released on a single American movie screen in the fall of 2007, racking up a domestic box office total of just $9,397. The mainstream reaction to Smiley Face was more tepid. What I do know for sure is that for the next 88 minutes, we laughed until our stomachs were sore and our cheekbones ached. I can’t remember all the specifics, but it probably happened something like that. We probably put the disc into the DVD player downstairs because that was the room with the comfiest couch. We probably smoked another bowl in the garage - quietly, so we wouldn’t disturb her mom and dad. When we got there, we probably raided the kitchen for frozen french fries or leftover buffalo chicken pizza. Three years later, it wouldn’t be called anything.Īfter securing the rental, we probably took a detour on the way back to her parents’ house, probably passed a weed-stuffed glass pipe back and forth as we carefully navigated the tree-lined backroads of our New England neighborhood. After reading about it online, my best friend and I tracked down the DVD at our local video store, which was called Movie Gallery but used to be called Video Galaxy.
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