The world probably doesn't need
another stoner comedy—not with the likes of The Big Lebowski, Dazed And Confused, Harold & Kumar Go To White
Castle, and Dude,
Where's My Car? in
constant rotation—but it gets one anyway in Gregg Araki's Smiley Face, which probably connects to the experience of being baked better than any of
them. To wit: In one scene, a completely toasted Anna Faris is scarfing down a
bowl of corn chips in a stranger's house when she notices a framed
black-and-white picture of an ear of corn. She surmises that the person who
took the picture must love the corn that went into those chips, and thus has
framed this thing that he loves. That gives her the idea that she should start
framing pictures of things that she loves, like lasagna, which of course
Garfield loves, so maybe to be "meta," she should frame a picture of President
James Garfield. This is how the stoned mind operates, making brilliant,
inspired connections that are usually completely inane.
And so it goes with Smiley Face, which was based on a script by
Dylan Haggerty that originally circulated under the title The Being John
Malkovich Of All Pot-Smoking Stoner Movies. It's a fittingly loose, shambling little nothing of
a comedy that's occasionally inspired, but at least a draft or two short of its
potential. Still, it's a pleasure to watch Faris—a gifted, likeable
comedian who tends to be the best element of many terrible movies—wander
slack-jawed through a surreal day in Los Angeles. Already toasted by 9:15 a.m.,
Faris eats all her creepy roommate's forbidden cupcakes, not realizing that
they're also filled with pot, which compounds her high. She then tries to set
an ambitious agenda for herself: Buy more pot to replace the cupcakes, go to an
acting audition, pay her dealer (Adam Brody, in dreadlocks) before he seizes
her thousand-dollar mattress, and scrape up enough cash to keep the power from
getting cut off.
That would be a full afternoon for
anyone, let alone a woman so high that she can barely put one foot in front of
the other, but Smiley Face is a journey without much of a destination, not even
somewhere as modest as White Castle. With a murderer's row of guest appearances
by recognizable faces—including John Krasinski as a nerd with a crush on
Faris, Brian Posehn as a city bus driver, and John Cho and Danny Trejo as
non-union drivers for a pork-processing plant—the film just ambles along
merrily through one goofy diversion after another. At some point, the original
manuscript of The Communist Manifesto turns up, and that's really just par for the course.