"This is the story of how a person got from point A to point Z."
— First line of Opening Narration by Roscoe Lee Browne
Smiley Face is a 2007 stoner comedy film directed by Gregg Araki and written by Dylan Haggerty.
Jane F. (Anna Faris) is an aspiring actress and regular pothead. Her normal day revolves almost exclusively around getting stoned and doing fun things like eating snacks, playing video games and sleeping on her wonderful bed.
One fateful morning, Jane finds in the fridge a batch of delicious cupcakes that her creepy roommate Steve (Danny Masterson) is saving for a Sci-Fi convention, and has specifically told her not to eat. Of course, she eats all of them, and only then realizes they were laced with pot.
Now blazed out of her mind, Jane tries to fix her predicament by getting through a list of important things she needs to do that day: in addition to buying more pot to make more cupcakes, she must go to an acting audition and pay her power bill in person before her apartment's electricity is cut off. Thus begins a series of misadventures that take Jane all over Los Angeles.
John Krasinski and Adam Brody appear in supporting roles, and several more prominent actors appear in cameos (including Jane Lynch, Danny Trejo, John Cho, and Roscoe Lee Browne in his final film appearance).
Tropes associated with this work include:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Brevin is this to Jane. His affection is primarily one-sided, as prior to her asking him for help, she never shows interest in or interacts with him besides him staring at her every time he comes over to hang out with Steve
- AM/FM Characterization: Jane is seen doing a bong hit while listening to the appropriately psychedelic "Waterfall" by The Stone Roses. Reflecting his square and nerdy personality and appearance, Brevin's musical tastes seem stuck in the 70s and 80s - he listens to Styx and A Flock of Seagulls in his car, and one of the times he's staring at Jane, the soundtrack starts playing "Keep On Loving You" by REO Speedwagon.
- A Simple Plan: Jane has to get weed to replace Steve's cupcakes, bake new cupcakes, go to her audition, and pay the power bill. With how heightened her state of mind, things go downhill starting from baking the new cupcakes.
- Bookends: The opening line of the film summarizing it as going "from point A to point Z" is quite literal. Jane's first scene starts with a close-up on the A of her laptop keyboard as she plays a video game, and one of her last scenes features her at the top of a Ferris wheel in a passenger car labeled "Z".
- Buffy Speak: Jane's Rousing Speech is actually just a profanity riddle rant about how everything is like, fucked.
- Butt-Monkey: Jane spends the entire movie getting herself into trouble and creating more trouble in her attempts to fix it. In fact, this is one of the few stoner comedies with an unambiguous Downer Ending for the stoner protagonist.
- The Cameo: Multiple celebrities appear in roles contained to one or several scenes.
- Brian Posehn plays a bus driver.
- Rick Hoffman plays a guy riding the bus (credited as "Angry Face") who scolds Jane for breaking a boy's toy car after she falls down.
- Jane Lynch plays the casting director at Jane's audition.
- Danny Trejo and John Cho play factory workers for a meat-packing plant who meet Jane when she sneaks into their truck expecting it to take her to Venice.
- Jane randomly runs into Carrot Top at Venice Beach. Of note is how he only shows up in a single shot and has no speaking lines.
- Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Wherever Jane goes, people seem to immediately notice she is extremely high.
- Can't You Read the Sign?: When Jane finds Steve's cupcakes, we see that he has left a paper telling Jane, specifically, to not eat them.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Jane becomes this after eating an entire plate of cupcakes laced with marijuana. She usually walks around with a buzz, but is a little more out of it, to say the least, after the cupcakes...
- Cluster F-Bomb: Jane's Rousing Speech at the hot dog factory is actually just Buffy Speak with copious amount of F bombs sprinkled in.
- Crush Filter: How Brevin sees Jane, at least until he has to deal with her for an extended period of time.
- Delusions of Eloquence: Jane launches into what she thinks is a Rousing Speech about worker's rights at the hot dog plant, but after seeing the shocked reaction from the boss and two workers, the film rewinds showing Jane just rambling incoherently about how everything is fucked.
- Disaster Dominoes
- Downer Ending: Jane is arrested and convicted of grand larceny and property destruction, for which she is given a five-year suspended sentence and 1,500 hours of community service. Her failure to pay back her debts also leads to her and Steve's apartment getting its power cut off and its furniture taken, including her beloved bed. It's only a bad ending by light-hearted comedy standards, but regardless, unlike the protagonists in typical stoner flicks, Jane never manages to resolve the mess she got herself into and is seriously punished for all the trouble she caused. The only silver lining is that for all that she puts him through, Brevin appears to still be in love with her.
- Drugs Are Bad: This might not have been
the intended message of the movie, but Jane's marijuana habit completely wrecks her life. - Erudite Stoner: Jane and Steve have a surprisingly cogent discussion about the economics of the drug trade while smoking.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Brevin forgets his wallet on the dashboard of his car when going to the dentist, and a subtitle pops up saying it will be stolen in ten minutes. When Brevin and Jane leave the dentist's office, the car window has been smashed and the wallet taken.
- Flush the Evidence: paranoid, and thinking a cleaner is the police Searching the Stalls, Jane flushes the precious bag of government weed down the toilet.
- Forgetful Jones: Jane has keeps forgetting what she was supposed to be doing.
- Forgot to Pay the Bill: Jane needs to pay the power bill in person, and Roommate Steve left her cash for that purpose. The cash gets used on weed, and as the day unravels, Jane just fully forgets she was supposed to do that, and at the end, Steve comes home to a ransacked apartment with no power.
- "Have a Nice Day" Smile: The poster features Jane, high as a kite, hugging a giant yellow smiley face.
- How We Got Here: the film opens with Jane on the Ferris wheel at Venice Beach, wondering out loud how she got there.
- I Love the Dead: Dealer Steve and Jane are convinced Roommate Steve fucks skulls. If the ending scene is to be trusted, he does.
- Intoxication Ensues: Jane starts her day off with a bong hit and playing video games, and when hit with the munchies, gorges on the plate of cupcakes left in the fridge. A while later she realizes that she is far more high than she expected and realizes the cupcakes were made with weed. The rest of the movie follows her trying to get through her day while extremely stoned.
- Imagine Spot: Jane prepares for her audition by reading the line out loud to herself, getting more Large Ham as she hears an imagined crowd cheer her on. Later, when she realizes she got a folder with an original copy of the Communist Manifesto, Jane imagines selling it for a fortune on eBay.
- Mikey starts fantasizing about Jane flirting with him as they're stuck in traffic.
- Large Ham: Preparing for the audition, Jane convinces herself that the louder she delivers the line the more applause she gets, so when she gets in front of the director, she belts the line out from the top of her lungs.
- Lighter and Softer - Gregg Araki's last movie was Mysterious Skin, a drama dealing with sexual abuse. Because of that movie's ultra serious subject matter, he wanted to make a movie with much lighter subject matter, which is how he came to make a Stoner Flick. Hell, this film is Lighter and Softer when compared to Araki's comedies, like The Doom Generation, which is ultra violent and disturbing.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Everyone's reaction when Jane drops the Communist Manifesto from the ferris wheel.
- Marijuana Is LSD: Zig-zagged. The effects of being too high off of edibles is portrayed pretty realistically, although Jane also has some visual hallucinations, such as the titular Smiley Face in the sky.
- One Crazy Night: Inverted, the plot takes place over one day, but Jane's intoxication leads her from one absurd situation to another.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted, Jane's roommate is called Steve, as is her weed dealer. When she gets late to the Venice Hemp Fest, he asks the two old guys there if they know his dealer "called Steve", which prompts them to ask if he has two arms and two legs and a head.
- Ridiculous Repossession: Dealer Steve warns Jane that she needs to pay him by three o'clock, or he and his friends will come over and take her and Roommate Steve's furniture. and they do.
- Road Trip Plot: Jane needs to get to her audition, pay the power bill and the Hemp Fest at Venice Beach, but keeps getting sidetracked.
- Sensory Overload: all noises sounds really loud to Jane, and waiting in the dentist lobby with a crying baby and the sound of dental drills become overwhelming for her.
- The Slacker: Jane is an out-of-work actress who smokes weed first thing in the morning.
- Sorry Ociffer: Jane doing her best to answer the police officer's questions when Brevin reported the stolen wallet.
- Stoner Flick: Follows the exploits of Jane, an aspiring actress with a heavy smoking habit who tries to accomplish a couple of errands while catastrophically high from a plate of weed cupcakes.
