Cake

Someday I need to make a list of great films about grief.  It’s a surprisingly cinematic emotion, providing a wide range of possibilities for actors to explore internal conflicts and feelings through understated performances.  In Cake, Jennifer Aniston plays Claire, a disaffected woman dealing with the aftermath of a recent accident, the breakdown of her family, and an addiction to painkillers. Adrift in a kind of non-existence that only the wealthy can access, she uses pills and booze to avoid mustering up the courage to either reengage with life or give up for good and kill herself. Watched over and enabled by her devoted housemaid Silvana (the terrific Adriana Barraza of Alejandro Iñárritu’s Amores perros and Babel) she spends most of her time sleeping, obtaining her drugs, and alienating the remaining people in her life.

Cake is more successful as an actor showcase than a character study. Aniston completely envelops herself in the role, delivering a subtle, consistent performance without a single false note. She captures the look, physicality, and behavior of someone inflicted with chronic pain, and she manages to make Clair sympathetic long before we come to learn the causes of her injuries and depression. But while we feel her pain, there’s little else in the movie to enable an audience to engage with her. Clair’s anger and suffering are so blunted and her emotional arc so minimal, that the picture often feels repetitive. 

The fault here probably lies with director Daniel Barnz, the writer/director behind the staggeringly contrived indie Phoebe in Wonderland (2008) and the simplistically saccharine inspirational drama Won't Back Down (2012). The screenplay by Patrick Tobin won many awards and lived on the Blacklist of acclaimed unproduced scripts, which makes me think there was more edge to Clair on the page than found its way to the screen. Barnz, Tobin, and Aniston manage to avoid nearly all the Oscar-baiting tropes in the depiction of their central character, but the movie still falls into many other narrative clichés. Despite Barraza’s fine performance, Silvana is not developed much beyond the typical dutiful-servant-to-a-rich-white-lady. And the scenes of Claire talking to the ghost of a suicidal woman from her support group (Anna Kendrick) bring nothing fresh to this overused dramatic device.

Cake invites comparisons to Rabbit Hole, John Cameron Mitchell’s 2010 film of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play of the same name. While the similarities between Nicole Kidman’s character in that movie and Aniston’s in Cake are mostly situational, looking at the two pictures together makes clear what’s missing from Cake—namely a sense of who Claire was before her accident. The image of Claire lying horizontally in the passenger seat of her car as her maid chauffeurs her around town is strong, but Claire’s physical pain and her need to anesthetize herself from it rob the picture of opportunities to explore the deeper aspects of Claire’s suffering.