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I Smile Back
R1 - America - Broadgreen Pictures Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (9th March 2016). |
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The Film
 Laney Brooks ( There's Something About Mary's Sarah Silverman) appears to have the storybook suburban life: successful insurance salesman husband Bruce (Threesome's Josh Charles), loving children Eli (Sleeping with Other People's Skylar Gaertner) and Janey (Shayne Coleman), a beautiful house, a minivan, and a shaggy shelter rescue dog that she does not particularly care for. She is also sleeping with her best friend Susan's (Righteous Kill's Mia Barron) restauranteur husband Donny (Wild's Thomas Sadoski) and has traded her meds for alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana. Laney's delicate balance of her double life is beginning to slip, however, and she is having a difficult time censoring herself in front of her children and controlling her rage with condescending school officials and fellow soccer moms. A month's stay in rehab opens up old wounds from her father (Fright Night's Chris Sarandon) walking out on her mother, but Laney seems not to allow her doctor (Oz's Terry Kinney) to probe any deeper than her own superficial self-diagnosis and she comes out of rehab either having fooled him or with the unspoken understanding that she will be back when she actually wants help. Laney and Bruce play up the happy and loving parents to the point of parody, and this is not lost on Eli who has begun to exhibit what the school counselor (Clark Jackson) diagnoses as potentially debilitating ritualized behavior (rapid blinking, excessive pencil sharpening, toe tapping) to cope with anxiety. Blaming herself, Laney decides to confront what she believes to be the root of her problems when she accompanies Bruce upstate to an insurance convention. Based on the novel by Amy Koppelman (who co-scripted with Paige Dylan) and produced by screenwriter husband Brian Koppelman (Rounders), I Smile Back is refreshingly not another portrait of the slow living death of suburbia but more a case study on the long simmering emotional issues segue into a life of compulsive behaviors that we associate with the suburban ennui. However stultifying Laney's "Groundhog's Day" routine of a life might seem, the film suggests that the pressure she feels to be a "good wife, a good mother, and a normal person" may stem from her father's abandonment and her mother's emotional devastation. The film also refuses to reduce Laney's problems to mere "daddy issues" as her father (wonderfully played by Sarandon) reveals a defining episode from his own childhood that mechanisms passed on to her and from her to her children not genetically (as she supposes when confronted with Eli's ritual behavior) but through learned behavior resulting from the inability to cope with anxiety. The film ends on a despairing note as Laney, left with the choice of illegal drugs and promiscuity or prescription medication to numb herself to her surroundings, hits rock bottom and does not seem as though she will be getting up any time soon. Silverman and Charles give fine performances but the filmmakers favor an elliptical style perhaps meant to mirror the combination of Laney's interior world and her wavering awareness of her effect on others. What the film achieves is ultimately a series of strong and moving moments but the film is too slight overall to convey its interesting insights, seeming more like an arty variation on a Lifetime identikit TV movies. 
Video
Broadgreen's dual-layer disc affords a high bitrate encode to this handsomely-lensed production that favors cold blues, whites, and blacks in the exteriors while intentional softness and warmer interior lighting tends to cast an orange haze over entire shots. 
Audio
The Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks (original English and a Spanish dub) are appropriately front-oriented for such an intimate drama with snowy suburbia seeming desolate in its sparse atmospherics apart from scenes dominated by the score or noisy interiors. Optional English SDH subtitles are also provided. 
Extras
Apart from trailers for other current and upcoming Broadgreen releases - including Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups - the disc's sole extra is "In Conversation with Sarah Silverman at TIFF 40" (19:19), a Q&A segment edited to focus on the feature film itself and with a preview clip replaced with the equivalent scene from the feature master. Silverman answers the usual questions about how a dramatic role is a change for her, how the author and producing couple thought she would be right for the role after hearing a radio interview she gave about her own battle with depression, and her preparation (or lack thereof) for some of the film's more challenging scenes. Some filmmaker commentary or contextual information about the source novel and its autobiographical nature would have been welcome. 
Overall
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