Is ‘Smiley Face’ the best movie ever made about getting high?
The stoner comedy has a long and hazy history in the annals of cinema, with new entries to the bespoke subgenre arriving at regular intervals, but Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face might well be the best of the bunch.
There are movies made by people who are high, movies that are best enjoyed while high, and movies made by people who are high that were made to be enjoyed by people who are also high. However, none of those sentiments directly apply to Araki’s ninth feature.
Of course, that’s not to say it’s a hard-hitting drama when Anna Faris plays a permanently stoned actor who accidentally ingests pot-laced cupcakes and becomes caught up in a spiralling string of misadventures that push her to the brink of a breakdown. Still, Araki viewed it first and foremost as a performance piece.
Faris was already a proven comedy star when the film was released in 2007. While it’s admittedly a showstopping exercise in mugging and pratfalling, the filmmaker had much grander ideas in mind than simply filling out the industry’s remit for weed-crazed shenanigans without having anything else to say.
By his own admission, Araki is “not a big stoner,” and neither is Faris. However, putting the pair of them together for an 84-minute escapade that revolves entirely around the devil’s lettuce and its potential ill effects was a recipe for magic. Casting a retrospective eye over Smiley Face for Nylon, the writer and director remains adamant that “Anna should have gotten an Oscar for that, in my humble opinion.”
“The things she does in the movie – if you really, really watch it – are very subtle and not easy. Jane is not a very sympathetic protagonist; she does dumb things, and it can be exasperating to watch,” he said before furthering the nuances of her work. “Everything was so carefully composed. She had to be so precise. If she was an eighth of an inch off her mark, the shot wouldn’t work. She had to be completely sober and completely on it.”
That being said, Smiley Face still features Faris becoming increasingly paranoid as a result of her predicament. All of this led her to try and pay off a debt to her drug dealer only to make things worse, flush her stash down the toilet in a panic, attempt to outrun the authorities, end up with a first edition copy of The Communist Manifesto, get waylaid at a meat packing plant, and end up being arrested and sentenced to 1,500 hours of community service.
It’s a very silly movie, then, but it’s not exactly entirely pro-weed. After all, Faris’ trials and tribulations are all caused entirely by her weed dependence, something that’s clearly been an issue before Smiley Face even started, considering her whole existence hinges almost entirely on maintaining her high at all times and at any cost. When a particularly bad high is foisted upon her accidentally, it’s not a coincidence it becomes the worst day of her life.
It fits nicely into Araki’s recurring motif of outsiders trying to find their place in the world, too, so even though it’s a major departure in terms of tone from much of his previous work, it’s completely reflective of his sensibilities as a filmmaker. The best stoner comedies are the ones that audiences can enjoy without having smoked a single joint in their life, and Smiley Face is firmly among the upper echelons of those that fit the bill.
