Smiley Face Review - Written by Kelsey Zukowski

Smiley Face

Review By: Kelsey Zukowski
Starring: Anna Farris, John Krasinski, John Cho, Danny Masterson, Adam Brody, Danny Trejo
Directed By: Greg Araki
Written By: Dylan Haggerty
Released: 2007
Grade: B+

Greg Araki did an absolutely amazing job with the magnificent yet controversial film, Mysterious Skin. There was so much permanent pain, emotion, and misunderstandings that were so powerful. His direction in the film really helped bring out the seriousness of child molestation and the search of finding who you are. This is a very difficult film to beat, but Araki’s follow up film, Smiley Face, does a very good job. Now Smiley Face is about as different from Mysterious Skin as possible. Mysterious Skin is completely dark and intense while Smiley Face is light and funny with a goofy persona that is hard not to love.

Jane (Farris) is an aspiring actress even though there doesn’t seem to be anything motivated about her. Usually her drug habit seems to get in the way of other things including working, cleaning, and therefore can’t afford the lifestyle she is living in. Her roommate, Steve (Masterson) is completely annoyed and disgusted by her. He is the more responsible roommate and is tired of picking up the all of the slack. When Jane eats an entire batch of “special cupcakes”, she gets so stoned that everything seems to be working against her that day. She has to pay the power bill or they will lose their power and when Steve leaves he is counting on her to do this. Jane also has an important audition that day that she can’t reschedule. For some reason or another, she decides that a good preparation tool to get in tune with her creative side would be to smoke even more. So she calls her dealer, Steve (Brody), to get her more drugs, but she ends up being short on cash. Jane already owes her dealer money so in order to get her fix she has to pay him back at Hemp Fest by 3 o’clock.

Things just get worse from there. She fries her pot on the stove. Jane leaves it to go talk on the phone just to get dumped by her boyfriend, meanwhile it completely burns and it along with her phone gets destroyed. It turns out that she only has about a dollar left to her name. If she can’t pay her dealer back he will start to take her furniture until she does and the power will be turned off if she can’t come up with some more money. So Jane decides to sell her government weed. When she eyes a police officer she suspects that they are after her for this and it makes matters worse that she also essentially steals a document worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Anna Farris really has a great time with this role and Araki took this project on, feeling that Farris was the one to play Jane. Her voice and even her general appearance was modified to fit the part of Jane. She is very convincing as a stoner slacker. Her character seems to have a very go with the flow mentality, but with everything going wrong there are constant instances of her freaking out. At first I didn’t even know that John Krasinski was in the film. Danny Masterson and Adam Brody were advertised as the bigger stars of the film even though they have much smaller parts and Krasinski seems to be the one who is on the top of his game. He plays a nerdy guy who has a good hold on his life. He falls for Jane, but she doesn’t fall back. Krasinski has a great subtly to him that works well with the bizarre characteristics that Farris puts forward. Surprisingly enough, John Cho is actually more of a straight edge in this film. He is a simple man who works at a meat factory. He works hard and really doesn’t want anything more out of life, he is content with his life as it is. Alongside Cho is Danny Trejo who is also works with Cho’s character and is funny for the little amount of time that he is in the film. Adam Brody and Danny Masterson do a decent job as the two Steves. Masterson claims that this is the character that has been closest to who he really is. He plays a more low key guy with science fiction interests. Jane Lynch was only in one scene as the woman casting the part that Jane was auditioning for. Lynch’s reactions were funny and even added further as this ended up putting Jane in even more of a panic. Brian Posehn of The Sarah Silverman Program had a small part too as the bus driver badgering Jane.

Smiley Face is full of endless laughs from beginning to end. Of course, given that the whole movie is wrapped around the fact that Jane is so high, it is all very dumb comedy. Now I mean that in the sense of the main character being like this so everything she does follow this pattern. The script itself is pretty well written and really brought to the screen wonderfully through Araki and his cast. Smiley Face is actually very creative, packed full of completely out there and bizarre things. This really adds to the humor and it is really the little things that make this so good. Just some of the facial expressions especially some of those by Farris really build off of the enjoyment of the movie more. It almost puts you in a similar state of mind to Jane, but actually in a good way. As the audience we can enjoy the simplicity and embrace the wackiness that the film constantly displays.