Posted: 04/20/2005

Smile

(2005)

by Anna Keizer

I hesitate to call this movie a “chick flick,” but let’s just put it this way… Any girl from the age of about ten to seventeen is going to love this film. I just hope that’s what writer/director Jeff Kramer had in mind as his audience when he came up with the idea for Smile. The film opens with an abandoned newborn found by some workers in rural China. As the one worker picks up the baby, he exclaims, “Look at her face!” This, of course, immediately sets up the plot of the film. Just what is wrong with this little girl’s face? In short order, we realize that the same worker who found her also took her into his home. Although it eventually costs him his own family, Daniel (Luoyong Wang) raises the baby as his own daughter. However, as we see Ling (Yi Ding) grow, the camera in a very conspicuous manner shields her visage from our gaze. This young woman refuses to even leave the house unless she has a cloth to hide her face from the public.

At the same time, living on the other side of the world- and in a completely different kind of world- is Katie (Mika Boorem). A well-to- do teen living in Malibu, California, Katie deals with the typical problems that confront a girl her age: the prom, boyfriends, fighting parents. Luckily for her, however, there’s one person who sees more to this girl than just another shallow, self-centered seventeen year- old. Mr. Matthews, the community service coordinator, hands Katie a pamphlet for “Doctor’s Gift”, a program that helps children around the world by providing free surgeries to correct facial deformities. He urges Katie to seriously consider being a volunteer for the program. Sure enough, she takes him up on it. The trajectory is now set for Katie and Ling to meet.

What I just explained basically constitutes the first two-thirds of the film. If you’re willing to sit through that completely predictable first hour, though, you will be rewarded. Once Katie boards that plane for China, the film finally takes a turn for the better. Maybe because Kramer is no longer relying on the stereotypical plotlines of so many teen flicks past, he is able to show us something fresh and new as Katie discovers something more about herself and life. In particular, once Katie meets her roommate for the service project, Linda (Cheri Oteri), the film really gets a jolt of energy from this actress’ comic wit. Any scene with Oteri is a delight to watch. You’ll actually laugh out loud, I promise. Yet it’s when Katie finally meets the young children about to go into surgery that the film hits its stride. Without any kind of heavy- handed melodramatic direction, Kramer simply shows us a young woman who now realizes not only her lucky lot in life but also that there is so much more beyond her little world in Malibu. Although she isn’t given much to work with for most of the film, this one scene establishes Boorem as a young actress with the potential for a great future.

If only the first part of the film had the same kind of energy and genuine feeling that make up the last third of the movie. As it is, most people will be too tired of the rehashed teen melodrama that encompasses most of the film to care about the ending. Yet as I mentioned earlier, it will enthrall any adolescent girl. If you have a thirteen year-old daughter, this is a flick for her. Endure the first hour for her sake and then enjoy the last half-hour for yourself.

Anna Keizer is a film critic and screenwriter living in Los Angeles.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com