A Moment For Smile

Let’s take a moment and give it up for this 1975 Michael Ritchie film, an example of the kind of social satire that has pretty much disappeared from movie theatres — a kind that doesn’t exaggerate, deals plain but clever cards, favors subtlety over hammer blows and treats its characters with dignity, or a semblance of. But Karyn Kusama says it better:

In his 10.9.75 review, N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby called Smile, which focuses on an annual Junior Miss beauty pageant in Santa Rosa, California, “a pungent surprise, a rollicking satire that misses few of the obvious targets, but without dehumanizing the victims. It’s an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.”

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81 thoughts on “A Moment For Smile”

  2. Arguably Bruce Dern’s best performance. Maybe inarguably. But everyone’s terrific (and Michael Kidd is sensational), including a number of actors better known from TV (Barbara Feldon, Nicholas Pryor, and Paul Benedict).

    BERNIE is a fine “social comedy,” but obviously different in tone.

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  4. Forrest Gump is a satire of America, and yet it’s criticized for being the type of movie it completely isn’t. (This is how Jeff somehow believed lefty Zemeckis was a Republican.) What’s great about it, is that while it’s poking fun of America for being the perfect place for a guy as dim as Forrest to succeed, it doesn’t condemn him for being so. Its earnestness allows people to laugh at him, but never to make fun of him.

    To borrow a Lexian rant, I am tired of satires, irony, and insincere looks at topics, genres, movies etc. Watching Cabin in The Woods really put the nail in the coffin with that. (Awful movie.) It’s tired, and it isn’t as clever as the filmmakers think it is.

    And Jack Black is fantastic in Bernie.

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  6. Big Bob Freelander!

    One of Dern’s classic characters.

    He worked well with Michael Ritchie. In “Diggstown” I still laugh just thinking about Dern’s character who goes huntin’ in a convertible Benz.

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  9. “Smile” is really interested in being human first and satirical second. Which is what makes the satire work: Your brain isn’t constantly thinking about the smug points the filmmakers are trying to score, and you can just love the characters, even as there are clearly Things Being Said. I can’t think of any recent film that achieves the same balance. Yeah, anyone who would mention the awful “Butter” admiringly in the same breath deserves to have his license to talk about movies taken away.

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  10. I think Silent Running is Dern’s best performance, but this sure runs a close second. And Smile is a terrific film.
    As to other great Dern performances, let us not forget The Cowboys and Coming Home.

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  13. Bernie was a fine film, although it didn’t really pop – it just kind of sat there (which is kind of the point, but still). And I don’t feel they gave enough credence to the theory that he did it for the money. But overall, it was a solid movie.

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