Smiley Face
Directed by Gregg Araki at IFC Center
When Gregg Araki first noticed the screenplay for Smiley Face, the hallucinatory comedy had a significantly more difficult title. “It was called The Being John Malkovich of All Pot Smoking Stoner Movies,” the director recalls over the phone from his Los Angeles-based office. Araki revisited the script shortly after completing the much-acclaimed Mysterious Skin in 2004. “I didn’t want to make another super-serious movie,” he explains, referring to the sexual abuse plot at the core of Mysterious Skin.
Smiley Face, which chronicles the bizarre daylong adventures of an interminably baked aspiring actress, offered the ideal remedy. But tracking down the screenwriter, first-timer Dylan Haggerty, provided another challenge. “It didn’t say the last name,” Araki says. “It said ‘Dylan H.’ It was an AA type thing.” Once Araki found Haggerty, things started to click. The script had been optioned by producer Michael London for a tentative production starring Winona Ryder, but that never came together—and the option was about to lapse. Araki had the resources to make it happen, and when Scary Movie star Anna Faris became available for the lead, Smiley Face finally got realized.
Getting it to theaters, however, formed the tougher feat. While Smiley Face was a regular presence on the film festival circuit this year as the only movie with the distinction of screening at Sundance, South by Southwest, Cannes and Toronto, its distribution prospects devolved into an increasingly muddy behind-the-scenes affair. First Look Pictures nabbed the theatrical rights, but a disparity of resources from the original financier caused continual delays in the release strategy. Smiley Face was destined for a straight-to-DVD fate. Desperate measures have yielded something slightly better: The movie had a limited run at a single theater in Los Angeles, and opens this week at the IFC Center. The DVD release is slated for next year.
“Ultimately, I know the movie will find its peeps out there,” Araki says, noting its potential as a cult hit. “I’m a little bit disappointed,” he admits. “I love Mysterious Skin, but that’s kind of a dark indie movie, and this movie—because it’s poppy, brighter and more accessible, and it has Anna’s tour de force performance at the center of it—has a lot of easy marketing hooks to it.”
As stoner comedies go, Smiley Face certainly belongs with the cream of the crop. Faris’ character, a bong-guzzling woman interminably lost in hazy indifference, inadvertently complicates her existence after a strong case of the munchies leads to her accidental ingestion of spiked cupcakes. Riddled with paranoia, she embarks on a goofy quest filled with inexplicably complicated goals: She needs to make new pastries for her creepy roommate (Danny Masterson), pay back an irritated drug dealer (Adam Brody) and head to an audition, all before noon. What comes next defies easy synopsis. Needless to say, John Krasinski of NBC’s “The Office” enters the picture as a straight-faced weirdo with a heavy crush on oblivious Jane, whose journeys land her, at one point, in a meat factory—where she lectures the employees (including one played by Harold and Kumar star John Cho) on the finer points of Marxism.
“I always ask Dylan where the script came from,” Araki says. “He studied stuff like that at school. His brother worked at a sausage factory. All these weird bits and pieces of his life were injected into the script, but he just wanted to make a movie that was fun to watch when you’re stoned.”
Even if Haggerty’s intentions were primarily entertainment-oriented, it’s virtually impossible not to read Smiley Face as a loopy generational statement. With Faris’ hypnotically endearing performance at its core, the movie remains within the confines of Jane’s sloshed perspective. As a result, themes of youthful ambivalence and elusive responsibility abound: Jane recoils from the suspicions of anyone older than her, and she’s constantly fleeing arbitrary forces. Her encounters border on the surreal (a random cyclist rescues her from wandering across the freeway in a daze, and Roscoe Lee Brown narrates her thoughts from atop a ferris wheel), as though exploring the logic of a lazy mentality rather than simply observing it.
Whether or not he says so, Araki’s ninth feature maintains the dissection of contemporary mores visible throughout his oeuvre. While considered an essential contributor to the New Queer Cinema of the early ’90s with distinctive entries like The Living End and The Doom Generation, Araki denies intentional consistency as an artist. “I get asked all the time for my thoughts on the state of independent cinema, or the Queer New Wave,” he says. “I never think about those things. I just work on movies that I’m really passionate about. If I ever did a movie just for money, I’d kill myself.”
Directed by Gregg Araki at IFC Center
When Gregg Araki first noticed the screenplay for Smiley Face, the hallucinatory comedy had a significantly more difficult title. “It was called The Being John Malkovich of All Pot Smoking Stoner Movies,” the director recalls over the phone from his Los Angeles-based office. Araki revisited the script shortly after completing the much-acclaimed Mysterious Skin in 2004. “I didn’t want to make another super-serious movie,” he explains, referring to the sexual abuse plot at the core of Mysterious Skin.
Smiley Face, which chronicles the bizarre daylong adventures of an interminably baked aspiring actress, offered the ideal remedy. But tracking down the screenwriter, first-timer Dylan Haggerty, provided another challenge. “It didn’t say the last name,” Araki says. “It said ‘Dylan H.’ It was an AA type thing.” Once Araki found Haggerty, things started to click. The script had been optioned by producer Michael London for a tentative production starring Winona Ryder, but that never came together—and the option was about to lapse. Araki had the resources to make it happen, and when Scary Movie star Anna Faris became available for the lead, Smiley Face finally got realized.
Getting it to theaters, however, formed the tougher feat. While Smiley Face was a regular presence on the film festival circuit this year as the only movie with the distinction of screening at Sundance, South by Southwest, Cannes and Toronto, its distribution prospects devolved into an increasingly muddy behind-the-scenes affair. First Look Pictures nabbed the theatrical rights, but a disparity of resources from the original financier caused continual delays in the release strategy. Smiley Face was destined for a straight-to-DVD fate. Desperate measures have yielded something slightly better: The movie had a limited run at a single theater in Los Angeles, and opens this week at the IFC Center. The DVD release is slated for next year.
“Ultimately, I know the movie will find its peeps out there,” Araki says, noting its potential as a cult hit. “I’m a little bit disappointed,” he admits. “I love Mysterious Skin, but that’s kind of a dark indie movie, and this movie—because it’s poppy, brighter and more accessible, and it has Anna’s tour de force performance at the center of it—has a lot of easy marketing hooks to it.”
As stoner comedies go, Smiley Face certainly belongs with the cream of the crop. Faris’ character, a bong-guzzling woman interminably lost in hazy indifference, inadvertently complicates her existence after a strong case of the munchies leads to her accidental ingestion of spiked cupcakes. Riddled with paranoia, she embarks on a goofy quest filled with inexplicably complicated goals: She needs to make new pastries for her creepy roommate (Danny Masterson), pay back an irritated drug dealer (Adam Brody) and head to an audition, all before noon. What comes next defies easy synopsis. Needless to say, John Krasinski of NBC’s “The Office” enters the picture as a straight-faced weirdo with a heavy crush on oblivious Jane, whose journeys land her, at one point, in a meat factory—where she lectures the employees (including one played by Harold and Kumar star John Cho) on the finer points of Marxism.
“I always ask Dylan where the script came from,” Araki says. “He studied stuff like that at school. His brother worked at a sausage factory. All these weird bits and pieces of his life were injected into the script, but he just wanted to make a movie that was fun to watch when you’re stoned.”
Even if Haggerty’s intentions were primarily entertainment-oriented, it’s virtually impossible not to read Smiley Face as a loopy generational statement. With Faris’ hypnotically endearing performance at its core, the movie remains within the confines of Jane’s sloshed perspective. As a result, themes of youthful ambivalence and elusive responsibility abound: Jane recoils from the suspicions of anyone older than her, and she’s constantly fleeing arbitrary forces. Her encounters border on the surreal (a random cyclist rescues her from wandering across the freeway in a daze, and Roscoe Lee Brown narrates her thoughts from atop a ferris wheel), as though exploring the logic of a lazy mentality rather than simply observing it.
Whether or not he says so, Araki’s ninth feature maintains the dissection of contemporary mores visible throughout his oeuvre. While considered an essential contributor to the New Queer Cinema of the early ’90s with distinctive entries like The Living End and The Doom Generation, Araki denies intentional consistency as an artist. “I get asked all the time for my thoughts on the state of independent cinema, or the Queer New Wave,” he says. “I never think about those things. I just work on movies that I’m really passionate about. If I ever did a movie just for money, I’d kill myself.”
