Review: Jennifer Aniston does angst in a downbeat 'Cake'
In Cake, an exercise in epic misery that has less to do with genuine suffering than with winning its star some acting cred, Jennifer Aniston plays Claire Bennett, a well-to-do Los Angeleno whose face and body are mottled with small, hard scars.
In Cake, an exercise in epic misery that has less to do with genuine suffering than with winning its star some acting cred, Jennifer Aniston plays Claire Bennett, a well-to-do Los Angeleno whose face and body are mottled with small, hard scars.
In the opening scene, Claire sits in the circle of a woman's chronic-pain support group. It takes a while to discover the details of Claire's particular physical, and emotional, agony, but it takes only a minute for her to toss angry barbs at her earnest comrades. One of their members has jumped off a freeway overpass to her death, and the women are being asked for eulogies. Claire prefers to recount the comedy of errors that resulted in the suicide going unnoticed for days, a story involving a flatbed truck and a border crossing into Mexico.
Not long after this burst of cynicism, Claire is asked to leave the group. Then Nina (Anna Kendrick), the suicide, shows up, and shows up again, and again - an apparitional sidekick egging Claire into doing herself in, too.
"Don't be such a coward!" Nina says, urging Claire to jump into the swimming pool and drown.
Later on, Claire - who doesn't, of course, off herself, because if she did, the movie would be over and we wouldn't have the opportunity to experience Aniston's dazzling range - goes stalking Nina's grieving husband. He has soulful eyes, a soulful beard, soulful biceps, and is left to raise a 5-year-old on his soulful own. Maybe Roy - played by Avatar's Sam Worthington - can put the pieces of his life back together by helping Claire with hers.
Or maybe not.
"I can't save you," he cautions in his hushed Australian accent. "I can hardly save myself."
The most credible relationship in Cake is the one between Claire and her Mexican housemaid, Silvana (Adriana Barraza), who prays to God for Claire to get better and stop popping Percocet and OxyContin like Raisinets. Silvana cooks for Claire, consoles and counsels Claire, and drives Claire everywhere, because Claire, whose body is wracked with spasms, has to lie on the backseat of the car or tilt the passenger seat all the way back. Her view through the window is of treetops and clouds.
Directed in moody, downbeat tones by Daniel Barnz, Cake doesn't know when to stop piling on the angst. William H. Macy appears for a fleeting few minutes in an expository blast of melodrama that ends with his character curled on the sidewalk, being kicked and pummeled. And there's a teenage runaway from Boise (Britt Robertson), whom Claire brings home so the girl can make a cake from scratch, a golden cake with fudge icing. It's metaphoric, of course, but Claire says it tastes really good, too.
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