Review

Cake

Physically and emotionally damaged Claire Bennett (Jennifer Aniston) semistalks the husband (Sam Worthington) of an acquaintance who committed suicide in Daniel Barnz’s Cake.
Physically and emotionally damaged Claire Bennett (Jennifer Aniston) semistalks the husband (Sam Worthington) of an acquaintance who committed suicide in Daniel Barnz’s Cake.

The most cynical reading of Cake is as a grab of Oscar glory by its star and executive producer, Jennifer Aniston, who rightly is being hailed for her portrayal of a woman debilitated by chronic pain.

The conventional wisdom is that it's a mediocre movie elevated by a performance that won't quite win the Best Actress Oscar, which is destined to go to Julianne Moore for playing a woman debilitated by early-onset Alzheimer's in Still Alice, which (it is widely said) is another Lifetime-quality film that features remarkable acting.

86 Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Adriana Barraza, Anna Kendrick, Brittany Robertson, Chris Messina, Felicity Huffman, Lucy Punch, Mamie Gummer, Misty Upham, Sam Worthington, William H. Macy

Director: Daniel Barnz

Rating: R, for language, substance abuse and brief sexuality

Running time: 102 minutes

I don't think I've ever watched a Lifetime movie, and while there are parts of Cake which seem a little pat and shallow, it impressed me as having serious intent. It had the feel of a very special episode of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie, and I don't mean that as a knock.

Director Daniel Barnz isn't a particularly subtle craftsman, though this does represent a comeback of sorts. Barnz followed his uneven but interesting debut, 2008's Phoebe in Wonderland (which starred Elle Fanning as a 9-year-old with Tourette's syndrome) with the depressingly misguided young adult romance Beastly in 2011. If nothing else, Cake may have arrested this once-promising director's fall.

When we first meet acerbic and physically scarred Claire Bennett (Aniston), she's in a chronic pain support group meeting, where the members are seeking "closure" after the suicide of fellow sufferer Nina (Anna Kendrick). Claire is exasperated by the platitudes mouthed by the members, who express dismay that Nina didn't reach out for help and left behind a husband and young son to cope with her death. Like the unflinching iconoclast she is, Claire delights in recounting the comically grisly details of Nina's demise -- she jumped from a freeway overpass and landed on a truck that was headed for Mexico. When they shipped her body back, it got held up in customs.

Claire comes home to find a couple of messages on her voice mail. Group leader Annette (Felicity Huffman) thinks it'd be better for everyone if Claire didn't return to their meetings; perhaps she should seek counseling for her anger issues. And Claire's estranged husband (Chris Messina) wants to know when she won't be home so he can come by and pick up the rest of his things. Claire scrounges around for some Oxycontin (her stash is getting low), finds herself unable to sleep, and goes out to soak in her pool. She's awakened the next morning by her maid Silvana (Adriana Barraza, in a quieter performance that's nevertheless at least the equal of Aniston's), and we soon discover the dynamic between the long-suffering caretaker and her prickly, privileged mistress.

The film gets better from there, and despite a few clunky patches where the ghost of Nina shows up to engage Claire and encourage her to follow her into oblivion, it ends up being effective and affecting. As awful as Claire can be, her saving grace is that she's quite funny. Aniston doesn't underline her drollness, but the best part of her performance is not how Claire suffers (there is no wailing scene where she breaks down in self-pity or pain) but how she refuses to suffer a foolish world.

And the relationship between Claire and Silvana turns out not to be as one-sided and stereotypical as it first appears. These women have a deep bond that predates Claire's catastrophic traumas. We eventually learn a few details about how Claire came to have her scars and, to his credit, Barnz doesn't overexplain. What's really good about Cake is how it never slips into melodrama or devolves into a simple story about hard-won redemption. Some of the credit belongs to screenwriter Patrick Tobin, but Barnz manages the difficult trick of maintaining a delicate balance between farce and sentimentality, allowing Aniston a chance to craft a starkly unsentimental portrait of a damaged woman weighing the pain of living in the world against the unknowable alternative.

MovieStyle on 01/30/2015

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