It is hard to think of a better-titled film than “I Smile Back.” Ostensibly about the nervous breakdown of well-off housewife Laney Brooks (Sarah Silverman), it is also about the price we pay when we suppress our real responses – when we laugh at an unfunny joke, feign fascination when we’re bored to tears, repress our anger around a phony or a bully. When we smile back when we feel like screaming or crying.
Silverman, as it happens, possesses a wide variety of smiles in her arsenal. We’re well acquainted with many of them through her Emmy Award-winning stand-up: the lopsided smirk that precedes her best punch lines, the goofy grin she wears at her most salacious, the simpering that accompanies her nasal singsong. She employs all these and many more – leers, cry-smiles, heart-breaking beams – as Laney, who already is in the throes of a downward spiral when we are first introduced to her.
The mother of adorable elementary school-aged children Eli (Skylar Gaertner) and Janey (Shayne Coleman) and wife of insurance guru Bruce (Josh Charles), Laney lives in a sprawling New Jersey house that is too tasteful to be an outright McMansion and too sterile to be truly warm. She occupies it as gingerly as she occupies her fortysomething body, which she regards with great disappointment in the bathroom mirror right before she hoovers a line of cocaine, drives her kids to school in a shiny black SUV, and then has hot hotel room sex with someone else’s husband. Continue Reading →
