A film review by Manohla Dargis, NYTimes.com on Jan. 22, 2015.
The modestly scaled, sad-funny indie drama Cake centers on a woman and the kind of grief that’s so unbearable this movie can’t even handle it. Jennifer Aniston plays Claire, who, having survived a horrific accident, now lives in near isolation in Los Angeles in a midcentury magazine layout of a house. Its clean lines, drawn by an architect and embellished by a period-design obsessive, make a vivid contrast with the scars jaggedly slashed across Claire’s face and body. Her wounds have healed, but her grimace and the shadows darkening it announce that she’s far from whole.
The spectacle of female suffering has produced a lot of great movies; Cake is not one of them. It’s the sort of well-intentioned independent effort that can make criticism feel like overkill. There’s nothing to hate, nothing to love. The movie’s greatest virtue is that it gives Ms. Aniston a little room to play against the somewhat sardonic tough-cookie type that she deploys in vulgar comedies, like We’re the Millers, in which she both gets the job done and rises enough above the material to stroll away unscathed. Bad dialogue and roles often seem to just slide off her, sluicing down a slight hardness that (as with the midcareer Ginger Rogers) adds a little brass to the bright, blond picture.
Written by Patrick Tobin and directed by Daniel Barnz, Cake opens with Claire upending her chronic-pain support group. The featured attraction in this circle of despair is a large, mounted photograph of a former group member, Nina (Anna Kendrick), who’s recently taken a fatal dive off a freeway ramp. As the attendees sniffle and dab their red eyes, the group facilitator, Annette (Felicity Huffman), encourages the women to process their grief. Will you forgive me? Annette asks, pretending to speak for Nina. Claire, understandably, has no interest in playing this game and says something blunt that shocks the room and, also understandably, leads to her being booted out. The scene is played for laughs, most sourly aimed at Annette and the other touchy-feely therapy saps.
All’s fair in love and especially in comedy. There’s something strange, though, about a movie that solicits laughter at the expense of its most disposable characters (here mostly played by extras), even as it insists on indulgence for its protagonist (played by the star). In Cake, that’s particularly the case, because it follows a woman weighed down by tragedy on a therapeutic journey from one stage of grief to the next. Claire is face down in depression at the start of the story, and it gives nothing away to say that she’s chin up in acceptance by the end. The movie hits so many familiar beats that it’s impossible not to see what’s next. It does what you expect at almost every turn, even with some hallucinations that, with one piercing exception, seem calculated to keep real hurt at bay.
Claire’s story emerges through a miasma of moans and true and false notes. Just getting out of bed is an agony for her, as Ms. Aniston suggests with a stiff, constricted physical performance to go with the character’s clenched face and shuttered, shattered world. The introduction of Nina’s husband, Roy (Sam Worthington), gives Ms. Aniston an excuse to warm Claire up. But he’s a distraction and an unfortunate one, because Claire’s most dynamic relationship is with her Latina housekeeper, Silvana (Adriana Barraza, very good), an exploited saint. Their relationship borders on the embarrassingly unexamined, and Silvana is woefully underwritten, but every so often — as when the story follows her home — life flickers into view, as does another movie about two mutually dependent equals. [Dargis’ rating: 2 out of 4 stars]
Blogger’s note: I just could not connect with Jennifer Aniston’s character in this drama. However, if you enjoy seeing Ms. Aniston playing against type (type being Rachel Green, her character in Friends), I recommend The Good Girl (2002) in which a young married discount store clerk (Aniston) strikes up a passionate and illicit affair with an oddball discount-store stock boy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who thinks he's Holden Caulfield.
Labels: drama
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