'I Smile Back' Is Hard to Watch. See It Anyway (2024)

There's a scene in Sarah Silverman's new drama, I Smile Back, in theaters today, that will make audiences gasp. Drunk and high out of her mind, Silverman's Laney blunders into her young daughter's room and watches the young girl while she sleeps. Despite her intoxicated state, it's clear that Laney is all at once frightened and humbled by the pristine perfection of her sleeping child. And, desperate to feel anything but unrelenting fear, she does the unthinkable: She mounts a stuffed animal and slowly, with muffled tears, masturbat*s on its button nose. The whole time she's doing this you're gripped with horror thinking, 'Please don't wake up, little girl. Please don't wake up.'

If the idea of this moment is enough to turn you off the film's dark subject matter—depression, self-abuse, infidelity, and addiction—hear me out. Yes, this is a hard film to watch (Entertainment Weekly calls it "grim abyss-gazing with no hope of salvation"),but it's my opinion thatwomenshould see it anyway.

In a recent interview with ELLE.com, Olivia Wilde discussed the merits of watching women come brutally undone onscreen. "It's interesting to see someone become unself-conscious," she said. "It's interesting to see someone lose the sense of belonging in society. It's something we all subconsciously long for: to stop playing by the rules. We wake up and we follow a plan that's been laid out for us. And we're all aware of the subtle desire to not play by those rules.And what would happen, what would happen if we all stopped doing that?"

InI Smile Back, Sarah Silverman goes bravely, boldly, disturbingly off the rails. Laneyis our worst nightmare, our ugliest thoughts, andour unspeakable impulses personified.

And, because of this, she is also our savior.

Look, every one of us hashad a really, really bad day; one we perceive to be sofull of minor injustices, mistakes, missed trains, nasty looks, and bad luckthat we've dreamt of relinquishing ourselves, Kamikaze style, into the depths of ourlibidinous ids. But, for whatever reason—be it responsibility, pride, or discipline—we don't. We put on a smile, brush our teeth, set the alarm,and reassure ourselves that tomorrow will be better.

It's an exhausting routine that makes up an alarmingly large part of adult life. And sometimes, when the Band-Aids we've invented for ourselves no longer stick, we're left feeling exquisitely, suffocatingly alone. That is what this movie is about: when the Band-Aid falls off and you don't know what the hell to do about it. And inits representation of those low tides, those ugly moments we hide from our partners, friends, and social media feeds, I Smile Backgives credence toan areaof the female psyche that's forso long been quarantined. By shining a light into these yucky, murky places and saying, 'This exists. This woman is floundering,' we are able to address ourown yucky and murky places and acknowledge thatsometimesthings simply don't feelokay. As Joan Didion puts it in Blue Nights: "When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not." Just because we hate when the wheels fall off doesn't mean we should pretend it doesn't happen.

Last January I wrote an essay about howLars von Trier's polarizing two-part opus Nymphomanic made me proud to be a woman. I feel the same waynow—perhapseven more vehemently so. As a person, a female person, who has an acute (if not hypersensitive) receptor for sadness, I find freedom in depictions of women who can't get out of their own way. Just because a character is morally abject, selfish, or spoileddoesn't mean that there isn't something human in there. And for every version of humanity shown, every weakness and shortcomingexplored, we enter one more data point into our understanding of experience.

Yes,I Smile Back is hard to watch, but since when did that make something (or someone) unworthy of our attention?