httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pc21w4wK-g
Photo: Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP. Several years ago, the writer Amy Koppelman, author of the 2008 novel I Smile Back, about an upper-middle-class, suburban soccer mom’s struggles with depression and substance abuse, was driving down New York City’s West Side Highway listening to Howard Stern interview Sarah Silverman about her own relationship with depression.
“She just connected with it,” Silverman tells me by phone.
Koppelman immediately knew that if she could adapt her novel into a movie, it would be Silverman she’d want to play her protagonist, Laney Brooks.
“She got the book to me,” Silverman remembers.
I Smile Back the film, which was directed by Adam Salky, plumbs new territory for Silverman, who is best, or really only, known as a comedian.
Silverman’s character, Laney, seems to have a lovely life: her husband, Bruce, is successful and adoring; their house is beautiful and ginormous; their two young kids are perfect.
Casting Silverman against type as Laney was actually a genius move: The surprise we experience in watching a beautiful wealthy mother self-destruct in the face of addiction is kind of like the surprise we feel watching a brilliant comic deliver a wrenching, raw dramatic performance.
“It’s not going to be everybody’s cup of tea,” Silverman admits, “But I do think it’s something that sticks with you. Everybody has been on one side or the other of addiction, mental illness, depression. How you feel about Laney and the movie is completely dependent on the prism of experience that you’re seeing it through.”