"Laura Smiles" is an alarmingly effective portrait of a woman's mental breakdown.
We are introduced to "Laura" at her happiest time, in a warm, loving relationship with her fiancé (a very appealing Kip Pardue) in the city, literally the love of her life. In flashbacks, we then see the sweet development of this relationship out of order as these moments become brightly lit and colored memories that desperately intrude on her later in life, as she becomes consumed with guilt and remorse over his fate.
These feelings start to overwhelm her current life as a wife and mother. As something inconsequential in what she calls her "suburban drudgery" triggers the past -- in the supermarket, cooking, cleaning, at a school play-- she acts out increasingly aberrantly to counteract the feelings they generate, especially when she can no longer distinguish past from present from dreams, recalling Blanche Du Bois.
While writer/director Jason Ruscio said in Q & A at the Tribeca Film Festival that he was inspired by the break-up of his relationship with the lead actress Petra Wright, the film is the most vivid portrayal I've seen of manic depression. Whereas depression is usually portrayed in films simplistically as catatonia, as in "Off the Map," here we see her acting out, in ways that ended up losing the audience's sympathy for her. She is also set up in contrast to the men around her who are sympathetic or understandable, including Jonathan Silverman as a grief-stricken lover who can keep in touch with reality. Nor do the therapy sessions make her more sympathetic, as she lies to the shrink and then, frighteningly, the therapy doesn't even help her.
It becomes as painful for the audience as for her to recall her earlier happy life as she seems to leave the present for it, like a Jack Finney time travel story.
This is a raw, bleak "Desperate Housewives" without the humor or satire.
