CR: Smiley Face

Smiley Face is director Gregg Araki’s follow up to his critically acclaimed Mysterious Skin, a stoner-comedy starring Anna Faris (Waiting, Lost in Translation, My Super Ex-Girlfriend) as Jane, whose day turns into a series of misadventures when she unwittingly devours a batch of marijuana cupcakes.

When I hear the name Gregg Araki attached to my film, it grabs my attention. Odd, considering I’ve only seen three films directed by him — The Doom Generation, The Living End, and Nowhere. The Doom Generation is my favorite, with superb art direction, camerawork, and music (Araki has a phenomenal ear for picking songs for his films – perhaps something to do with the fact he is a former music critic), and not to mention tons of tongue-in-cheek dialogue, bloody but comedic violence, and gratuitous sexual content. But it’s all fun and games till about the end, where the film takes a serious dramatic tone. I’m not a fan of Nowhere which is well made in terms of mechanics, but really failed to make me care about any of the characters, make me laugh, or shock me. The Living End was a self-funded ultra-low budget film (it took Araki three of these to get someone else to pay for his film), and did an excellent job of displaying the director’s talent and flair for style – precisely what a no-budget feature should do.

I have regrettably not seen Mysterious Skin, but I’ve heard enough about it to know that it is Araki ditched the campy humor and black comedy and approached the film’s dark subject matter in a serious dramatic tone (which he also has a knack for), resulting in the best-reviewed film of his career. And now he follows it up with Smiley Face, a stoner comedy starring Anna Faris (Waiting, Lost in Translation, My Super Ex-Girlfriend) as Jane, a slacker-actress living off of unemployment and a nice paycheck from a root beer add she did a while back. She spends her days stoned and lying around her apartment in her pajamas playing computer games and being easily distracted.

Jane’s world gets turned upside down when, already high at 9:17am, she devours the cupcakes her roommate was saving for a sci-fi convention, not knowing that they were packed with more marijuana. Jane is soon higher than she’s ever been before, has an audition to get to, an electric bill to pay, and needs to replace the cupcakes – not really that challenging by most standards, but in Jane’s state of mind…

Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this movie. I saw it toward the end of the festival, when I was admittedly a little burned out and my own attention span was drifting. Smiley Face is very funny, and moves beyond the standard stoner film gags and in favor of something more oddball. And Anna Faris is quite sexy (I did not realize it before seeing this film, but oddly enough there is a certain sex appeal to a girl who spends all day getting high in front of the TV and eating chips). And best of all, there’s no ‘pothead-elitism’ element to the film, and Jane even criticizes those who carve a lifestyle out of their drug of choice. And I do give Araki credit for again taking on something completely different than his previous work (this is as different from The Doom Generation and Nowhere as Mysterious Skin was). Araki wasn’t trying to make critic’s top ten lists with this film, he was trying to make people laugh, and on that level, he succeeded.