Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Sheldrake's orgasmic poetry on LAURA SMILES. I think if this film was a woman, she would have to get a restraining order and a taser gun to keep her valuables safe, if you know what I mean. Here's the review!

LAURA SMILES

RKO PICTURES!!!

Jason Ruscio, writer and director

Sheldrake here, live from New York City, Vestry Street, the Tribeca Film Festival. The world is not enough for this downtown crowd, these film professionals, these people who make pictures out of light and celluloid and bits, pictures that move and talk. They've taken over downtown from Battery Park up through Tribeca, filling every available screen and every restaurant with movies and parties. New York is Mr. DiNiro's town, in any sense you can come up with, real personal like; and this is his festival; and the local gentry would be well advised to cooperate. The crazy film typhoon has taken on a will and life of its own, a solid incoming 30-foot high wall of stories and music and movies spilling out of the theaters into crowds and actors filling the streets. The festival goes on for another seven days and if you aren't here in the middle of the madness, you're like nowheresville, baby.

Some think of suburbia, for example, as nowheresville, and this is where Laura, the lead character in LAURA SMILES played by Petra Wright, has ended up nine years after something happened to her that ended one phase of her life and...well, it didn't really begin anything, and that's the problem. What happened to her life, see it turned into one of those WB Road Runner cartoons, the coyote is riding some wheeled contraption; the contraption hits a low wall in front of them; the coyote keeps moving through the air, though the supporting vehicle has been stopped cold and left far behind. There's nothing under the coyote but air. It's a sad, sad situation, getting more and more absurd.

Let's drop the light tone here: Laura is a woman in very real trouble, dealing with an abandonment that left her stunned and alone years ago. What the movie does with its story and structure is try to explain present actions of hers which are inexplicable unless you know a little more about something you thought you knew everything about, and that little something more changes everything about what you understand. LAURA SMILES isn't about looking at the past, but about examining it, the way you pick up a familiar—even an intimately familiar-objet d'art and turn it over and find, after years of looking at the same spot, suddenly seeing the one point about the work that explains...everything. You hope. Those of us in middle age always smile at this, if we've gained any wisdom, because enough pain has taught us that explanations just make things worse.

The male actors, Kip Pardue (remember him opposite Stallone in Driven – best thing about that movie), Mark Derwin as Laura's husband – they're both wonderful. Kip is a great screen presence, gives a nice turn as young Laura's boyfriend in New York. Mark Derwin is indispensible as the funny, smart husband of Laura, who copes, as Mr. Bennett does in Pride and Prejudice, with overwhelming reality by reducing it with wisecracks. And the wonderful Jonathan Silverman who gives a deeply moving performance, the best of his career, as man who has lost everything and thinks he's found the road back. Holding all this together is the tour-de-force performance of Petra Wright as Laura, a woman who was cast into the strange land of suburbia nine years ago and who has delayed the inevitable journey of the soul such a change entails—until now.

The story structure in LAURA SMILES works the way memory works, we just don't remember certain important aspects of things that happen to us until we need them, and sometimes a little later than we really needed them. There's a feeling out there in the zeitgiest that self-examination—say instead, morbidity--of and for itself is good for the soul. Nonsense. All information is useful only if it can be used; otherwise it's there simply to-—torture us? obsess us? haunt us? ruin us? kill us? We choose to live either in the world, with those in front of us, with the real people and problems we face every day, or we choose to live in our minds, with past loves, failures, triumphs. When what's in our mind, the fiction we're spinning, becomes more important, more real to us then the car in front of us in the street, we'll run into trouble, or it will run into, and over, us.

There's so much to say about this wonderful, very deep movie. I pick up the movie mentally, turn it over, find new things that make me laugh and weep... Jason Ruscio has fashioned one of the most profound and real meditations in American Cinema on the conditions between men and women, and the conditions in our own hearts, that seem to make our happiness...not impossible but...insufficient. Happiness really isn't an answer to anything, and certainly not to Laura's soul suddenly, helplessly awash in pure hell. Throughout the seventies, in my opinion the very greatest period of American Cinema, great small films were made about human beings, about the sheer agony of being alive – what it means for us that in America, most of the population lead unfulfilled lives, happiness always in front of them and never quite within their reach. Not so much carrot and stick in this America, as an electric rabbit on a dog track. Not only aren't they fulfilled, they don't know what would do the trick or what good it would do them. There's simply no move for them to make on the board that is a winning move. Five Easy Pieces. Chinatown. The Long Goodbye. Carnal Knowledge. And then, around 1977, it all stopped, genre pictures won. What we're seeing now, for the last few years and getting stronger with every festival, every improvement in technology, every change in the economics, is the rebirth of adult cinema, difficult cinema, don't bring the kids, American cinema that seeks to surface the problems of our lives rather than to bury them in spectacle and excitement. Don't read this as an attack on genre cinema. Summer rides are wonderful, at carnivals of a warm summer night...in the summer. At night. At a carnival. It's just not where most of us live most of the time. Not even Sheldrake, the happiest of happy human beings, with a reasonably healthy mind (if we don't count the last three weeks, long story you'll never hear).

There is so much pain in life, and always more to come, and what hurt us years ago is never truly healed.

Now you know that. What do you do now?

My current reading is MIT's Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate, in which he notes that there are two views of life, one that posits that life is emininently fixable, that our minds are blank slates which, once filled with beautiful, well-made, good-intentioned input, will produce lovely positively-thought results. The other point of view is that human beings, whose emotions and minds commit to goals they can never achieve, to dreams of a heaven that can never be gained, living in fragile shells that improbably operate well enough until, finally, they do not, our deep need for love battling forever with our deep need to be independent—there's nothing for us but the inevitability of the tragic.

Sheldrake takes the third point, rarely voiced because it demands a leap from the pure into the practical: I understand the tragedy, think denying it with optimism is silly (which is not to say I find optimism, or healthy-mindedness, silly), but also find it useless to dwell on. As Hemingway noted, all love stories end in somebody dieing or someone leaving, and the faster you get used to that, the easier things will be for you.

Bad things happen to good people, happines is fleeting, pain is our general condition and sorrow and loss is our human lot... but after you've gathered those facts into a neat little bundle, it's about how you, as a human being, deal with it, with self-pity or ebullience. At the end of this movie, Laura smiles...a sad smile. Laura smiles...a knowing smile. Laura smiles...with love and acceptance, perhaps resignation...because all the other responses are insufficient. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Perhaps she has finally pulled down another book from Sheldrake's library, Beckett's Molloy, and read it's famous last lines:

“... perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens it will be I, it will be the silence where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.”

Sheldrake

NY NY

Tribeca