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This review was originally published on April 24, 2020. We’re resharing in light of Anna Faris Month.

Smiley Face (2007) opens with a conversation between Jane (Anna Faris), the heroine of the movie, and Roscoe Lee Browne. Well, not exactly. Jane, extremely high from scarfing an entire plate of pot-laced cupcakes she didn’t know were pot-laced earlier that day, is on a ferris wheel. Initially it seems like Browne, with his rich, stately baritone, might be the film’s narrator. But Jane responds to his musings as if she were a guest on Inside the Actor’s Studio. “Jesus, it’s like you’re reading my thoughts or something,” Jane at one point says in astonishment. “I am,” Browne replies. Jane ponders, a few moments later, how Browne has seemingly accessed her innermost thoughts so easily. “Because, you fucking pothead,” he coolly says. “You’re talking to yourself.” That realization brings Jane to her next realization — that she’s on a ferris wheel. How did she get here?

How did she get here? — the question floating above most of the action in Smiley Face. We don’t know very much about Jane except that she is a failing actress getting by on unemployment and leftover cash from a commercial she did a while ago, that she lives with very intense dude named Steve (Danny Masterson) whom we’d discover is an incel and/or a serial killer if we got to know him better, and that she is a committed stoner. But the movie needn’t worry about portraying Jane with that much nuance. All of its 84 minutes are taken up by her surreal, day-long journey after downing those cupcakes. Jane is meant to be an “all of us” sort of figure — an embodiment of anyone who’s ever endured a succession of banal-turned-fantastical experiences as a result of copious weed ingestion. 

Some of Jane’s exploits in Smiley Face include an audition for a bit sitcom part, an unwitting theft of a first-edition copy of “The Communist Manifesto” from an old professor of hers, a botched attempt at unionizing a sausage factory, and more. I’d like to go with a cliché and say that hilarity ensues following the introduction of each plot point, but that sells the work done here short. 

I don’t know if hilarity would ensue as dependably as it does if Faris’ performance weren’t genuinely masterful — she’s the Carole Lombard of playing high, with an arsenal of 101 different expressions for “bemused” — and if producer-director Gregg Araki didn’t so perceptively shoot and edit things as if the camera were the eyes of a smoked-out slacker. He astutely sprinkles on just-right musical flourishes to mimic a sudden jerk in Jane’s train of thought and intermittent insertions of cartoon imagery to represent her noisier-than-usual intuitions. (One time a bunch of animated arrows tell her that she should get in the back of a truck because there’s no way it isn’t going anywhere besides Venice Beach, specifically to where a hemp fest is being hosted.) 

I wonder what happened to Jane the day after this episode. But the thought, which does invite some darkness, doesn’t nag, since above all else, Jane is meant to be a great, if chaotic, hang for 84 minutes. I would happily go on a pot-assisted journey with her again — though maybe not one with so many contaminated cupcakes. Maybe a few less next time, and on a less already-eventful day.