“I’m sorry. I fucked up.”
“Why can’t you just stop? Don’t you love me?”
“I’m sorry. I fucked up.”
“Why can’t you just stop? Don’t you love me?”
“I’m sorry. I fucked up, again.”
If you or your partner is an addict, this will be a conversation in your life that runs on an endless loop, ceasing only when the user stops using, you split up, or someone dies.
In I Smile Back, the film adaptation of Amy Koppelman’s best-selling novel, Sarah Silverman plays Laney, a New Jersey mom who wants so badly to be a good wife and mother, but is plagued with anxiety, depression, alcoholism, and an addiction to cocaine and sex. It’s a gross story that will affect you.
Laney’s house is beautiful – it could be a page plucked from Town & Country. She’s a pretty 39-year-old woman with a great figure and nice clothes. In the morning, before her kids wake up, she pulls crayons from a drawer to colour their names, Janey and Eli, on their brown-bagged lunches and carefully chops the crusts off their sandwiches. As soon as they’re dropped off at school, she lights up a cigarette, tears off in her giant SUV, snorts cocaine and gets fucked in the ass by her friend’s husband.
Silverman’s performance as a desperate, guilt-ridden mother is riveting and believable; audiences who’ve lived through addiction will quickly recognize the intense feelings Laney incites. Sad, uncomfortable, enraging, sickening: you want to shake her, but there’s nothing anyone could say or do to make her stop. Her depression is heavy; her will to self-harm is greater than her will to live.
We see a lot of alcoholics and addicts in films, and when the alcoholic or addict is a mother, she’s often verbally or physically abusive to her children. If she’s rich, her drinking or cocaine habit is glamorized; if she’s poor, she’s cast as a low-life and down-and-out. We don’t often look at the upper-middle class woman, with a beautiful home decorated in her children’s school art, who appears to have the perfect life, but in reality is barely holding on.
As an alcoholic who comes from this world – comfy, conservative, great education, disposable income – I recognize parts of myself in Laney, and it’s terrifying. I want to say that my life would never look like hers, that I’d never be snorting lines in the bathroom while my children played in the garden, that I’d never cheat on my partner, that I’d never stash vodka in the cookie tray cabinet, but I know all too well that alcoholism will take you places that you could never fathom.
I’ve been sober for five years, and sometimes I tell myself that if I poured a glass of wine, I’d be okay, that I’d be no different than the moms in my Ladies with Babies group who laugh about “wine o’clock” and continually refer to a glass of wine as the cure-all and saving grace for tough days with toddlers. I imagine sharing a bottle of wine with my partner on a Friday night, and it being lovely, maybe even a bit romantic. Hey, maybe it would be! Maybe I could manage! But I can’t say for certain. I’ve learned that. Over and over. That looped conversation of “I’m sorry. I fucked up.” was my life, for many years.
What separates my sober and happy life with my 20-month-old son and loving partner, from the black-and-blue bruised, bloody-nosed disaster that Laney’s life becomes, is one sip of wine.
Addiction layered on top of mental health issues, like anxiety or depression, is a scary beast. With so many wires crossed and fried, even the most respected medical professionals are challenged by certain combinations. It’s easy to say, “Go to rehab!” or “Just take your meds!” but it’s not that easy. The mind and spirit is in such a corrosive tangled mess that it cannot be fixed by a quick tug of one loose thread.
During TIFF, I spoke with Amy Koppelman. We talked about a lot of things: the weight of motherhood, the depressed individual, women who fuck to numb; it was a heavy conversation that ended in tears. The one thing that has stuck with me almost every day since our meeting is the response she gave when I asked her what she’d say to Laney, or what she’d say to a friend who was self-destructing? If two beautiful young children and a loving husband can’t make someone stop, is there anything you can say? Not really, but Koppelmen, who, like Silverman, has suffered from depression, did have one suggestion: “Whenever I have ice cream with my children, we are happy. When I’m feeling really down, I cling to that. Find whatever that ice cream is in your life and hold it so hard, because even if you’re convinced that you’ll never feel that sense of happiness again, you will. It will happen again. Hold it close to your heart and remember it.”
But for some, it’s too dark to see the beauty.
I Smile Back opens exclusively at TIFF Bell Lightbox on December 4th. Watch the trailer below.
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