‘Smiley Face’ Is A Triumph Of Stoner Cinema, Thanks To A Career-Best Performance From Anna Faris

April 20th, known as “4-20” by marijuana hobbyists and (unless higher education has been completely transformed since 2002) a large swath of college students, can be a lonely fake holiday if you don’t smoke pot. But just as an affinity for particular sports is not a prerequisite for watching the best sports movies – how could anyone ever enjoy Tin Cup if that were the case? – it’s not necessary to fire up a joint in order to appreciate stoner cinema. Movie fans from straight-edge to daily users can probably come together on the issues of The Big Lebowski, Pineapple Express, and Dazed and Confused. But anyone looking for 4-20 viewing beyond the modest pot-movie canon can find a one-woman gateway drug: Anna Faris in Smiley Face (now streaming online for free at multiple outlets; praise be to Tubi). She is the Daniel Day-Lewis of goofy, slapdash comedies.

That’s not my crackpot observation. Around the time of Smiley Face’s 2007 theatrical release, Decider contributor Glenn Kenny called Faris’s work in the film “the most virtuosic performance of impairment since Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot,” a statement whose mock-grandiloquence is made perfect by its dead-on accuracy. In a way, Faris is doing a parody of the kind gimmick challenges that do, indeed, often win Oscars. She’s even playing an actress! In between unpromising auditions, Faris’s Jane likes to kick back and smoke pot at the unimpressive Los Angeles apartment she shares with an antisocial nerd. When said nerd makes a batch of cupcakes for a get-together, a stoned Jane consumes them (“Fuck you if you’re too hungry to get hungry when you’re stoned,” her narration says by way of addressing the potential munchies cliché). She only realizes that they’re pot-laced when she gets unwillingly, incapacitatingly high. From this point, a simple day of errands — pay the apartment’s electric bill, go on an audition, maybe replace the cupcakes she ate — becomes an odyssey.

Face was set to release on April 20, 2007, only to be, in an astonishing act of Jane-level bumbling, unceremoniously bumped from the schedule and receive a miniscule berth on that other day of stoner celebration, Five Days After Veterans Day. I saw it in an actual movie theater in New York City on New Year’s Day, 2008, stone-cold sober, and laughed my ass off. The story’s shaggy-dog stumbling through one-sided farce is amusing; screenwriter Dylan Haggerty has an ear for the low-key grotesqueries of twentysomething weirdos attempting to scrape together normal lives. That’s part of why, I think, the movie appeals even (or perhaps especially?) to a non-smoking square like me: It takes place in a world where pot is a fact of life, but doesn’t dominate the culture. It’s also directed with whimsical good cheer by indie-cinema pioneer Gregg Araki, completing a terrific one-two punch by making Smiley Face directly after the heartfelt dark drama Mysterious Skin. 

These are all aspects of the movie’s solid foundation, along with the impressive cast of now-familiar faces who were less so back in 2007. But the monument on top of all this is Faris’s performance. Her line readings are supernaturally funny, turning regular dialogue into punchlines. When she’s forced to consider using her treasured stash of “government weed,” she murmurs “I daren’t” with un-self-conscious drama, perhaps some hazy memory of acting training breaking through Jane’s dazed exterior. It’s a rare occurrence; for most of the movie, Jane is grievously and hilariously unable to disguise herself in any way. All she has to do is fake her way through a normal day, and Faris’s face — wide-eyed in paranoid horror, innocently enthusiastic about her terribly overzealous audition, plaintively hopeful when she attempts to talk into her burned-up flip-phone — simply will not cooperate. 

Finally, in a scene that lends credence to the reading of Smiley Face as a parody (however unintentional) of grandstanding Oscar-bait virtuosity, Jane delivers an impassioned Marxist-informed speech about workers’ rights, which is then rewound and revealed to be incoherent rambling that barely scrapes together a complete sentence. Most deliciously — as Kenny alluded at the time — this sputtering and grasping at meaning is, itself, terrific acting, suffused with inarticulate conviction.

Throughout the film, Faris makes the act of being really, really, really, cartoonishly stoned not just unexpectedly hilarious, but goofily relatable. Who among us hasn’t experienced a day in which a handful of relatively simple tasks were turned into a series of seemingly insurmountable disasters? (If you haven’t, well, have a child and get back to me.) If 4-20 should ideally function as a college-like day of relaxed partying, Smiley Face is a single-day saga functioning as a reminder of how difficult all of those other, normal days can be out in the real world — and how they require their own ridiculous feats of desperate, transparently unsuccessful acting. Yet despite Jane ultimately receiving a punishment that feels out of proportion with her irresponsibility, Araki isn’t leveling a judgment or a lecture — perhaps more of an observation that comically stoned shenanigans don’t always end in triumph, especially when you reach a certain age.

Indeed, Faris had a hard time finding more cinematic triumphs, even though she’s put together a solid and successful career. She followed up Smiley Face with her one decent-sized solo-movie hit: The House Bunny, a Happy Madison production similarly enlivened by her singular performance. The Faris trilogy is completed, somewhat halfheartedly, with her flop rom-com What’s Your Number? It’s as clumsy as Smiley Face is light on its feet, but, again there is Faris, turning her dialogue into rueful, gobsmacked gold, playing a character struggling to get her life together. Since her trilogy, she’s done a well-liked CBS sitcom and started a beloved advice podcast, leaning into her less punch-drunk side. If she ever goes back to her early-2000s character acting (May, Lost in Translation, Brokeback Mountain), she’ll probably still kill it. But Smiley Face remains a highlight, both of her career and of stoner cinema. It speaks to her brilliance as a performer that this a monument isn’t an Oscar movie or a zeitgeist megahit; it’s just a silly comedy about trying to get through the day.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned.