I Smile Back

A few years ago, I saw a movie called Prozac Nation. Christina Ricci starred as a college-bound young woman, coping with severe depression in the 80’s, when mental health wasn’t viewed as seriously as it is now. Over the course of the movie, she experiences highs and lows, and the movie shows how it affects both her and those around her. At the end, she gets prescribed Prozac, and it stabilizes her, but it also numbs her. Where once she felt deeply if dangerously, now, she feels stable but empty. It ends with her wondering if the trade-off is worth it. I Smile Back feels like a spiritual sequel, exploring that young woman as a housewife. Depression, substance abuse, mental illness, self-destructive behavior, all chipping away at the facade of the anodyne perfection in middle-class suburbia in which she lives. She struggles to find joy in the day to day trappings of being a wife and mother, and she is haunted by being abandoned by her father when she was 9. Affairs, drugs, alcohol, she does it all to hide the pain and fill a hole, and nothing works. And when it catches up, everybody pays a price. Sarah Silverman does a fantastic job here. She is the emotional centerpiece of the movie, and she proves to be more than capable of delivering the dramatic goods here. She gives a nuanced, layered performance, giving Laney a tragic depth. She is neither good nor bad. She is human and she is flawed, and she’s lost the capability to handle what she’s dealing with. She wants to want to be a mom and a wife, but she is her own worst enemy. And the cast around her, from Josh Charles as her beleaguered husband who both wants her to get better but also has a hard time being sympathetic, to the kids, to Chris Sarandon as her dad, are all excellent, showing the effects her mental illness has to those around her. The movie’s biggest flaw would be its whipsaw pacing through the events of her life. There’s no real sense of the time elapsed, other than her one month in rehab, but things happen so fast, it feels unnaturally compressed. The movie needed another 15-20 minutes to let some moments breathe, to show more of her attempt at recovery, to let things land instead of rushing to the next moment. Oddly, it’s the same flaw Prozac Nation had, although I felt that movie managed its sense of time better than this. It’s not a movie to recommend lightly, as it is definitely a heavy thing. It is not, strictly speaking, entertaining to watch a woman snort coke so she can get the kids to school on time. But Silverman’s performance is beyond words, and if you can handle something heavy, its worth it just for that.