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| Jennifer Aniston in "Cake." |
When we meet Claire (Jennifer Aniston), the main
character in “Cake”—a mournful, moving elegy of suffering and despair directed
by Daniel Barnz and written by Patrick Tobin—she's about a year removed from a
horrific car accident that claimed the life of her young son and left her with
severe physical and emotional scars.
The film is set in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles,
where this formerly successful and vibrant attorney now barely gets around and
winces in anguish at the slightest movements. Claire has all but dismissed her
husband, become misanthropic and would be living alone except for the loyal,
sympathetic housekeeper, Sylvana (Adriana Barraza), who sticks around and
drives her over the border to procure illicit painkillers.
Claire’s icy detachment and insensitivity get her booted
from the chronic pain group she’d been attending after derisively mocking the
suicide of another member. Subsequently, the former member, Nina (Anna
Kendrick), begins showing up in Claire’s nightmares as a pretty but vengeful
spirit, ostensibly and diabolically inching the protagonist towards the beyond.
Claire dives into Nina’s backstory and discovers that she
left a husband (Sam Worthington) and young child behind. She goes to meet the
husband and finds a lost and tortured soul not unlike herself. Wondering why
she hasn’t left her expensive but gloomy house, he asks in one of the movie’s
darkly comic lines, “Don’t you feel like you’re surrounded by ghosts?”
In a lesser movie, this kinship might be an excuse for romance
to develop. But the tragic characters in Barnz’s film are too wounded to derive
any pleasure from sex. Instead, they develop a peculiar friendship rooted in
the sharing of painful memories. The film is like a sad dirge, funereal,
haunting and morose. Claire's only other ‘friend’ isn’t even human, but rather
seems to be a single opossum who exits the shadows and turns up poolside,
accompanying her during late night swims—the nocturnal creature becoming an apt
metaphor for her dark, lonely existence.
Anchoring “Cake,” Jennifer Aniston gives her best
performance as the interminably angry, bitter and wholly unpleasant Claire.
It’s a joyless character, full of hopelessness and deep reserves of pain,
sadness and hate. Having had her world turned upside down, she now feels little
compassion for anyone else, expressing herself through hurtful turns of frigid
apathy and caustic sarcasm, as if she’s determined to return all the cruelty
life has dealt her to others. “Anger feels so good,” she says unapologetically
at one point.
It's a bit surprising that Aniston didn't get an Oscar
nod for her work. Maybe the Academy ultimately found the character too
unlikable. Still, it’s some performance—honest, uncompromising, expressive,
nuanced and fearless—and the former TV sitcom star looks the part, exchanging
her usual cover girl appearance for one that’s nearly lifeless, washed-out and
colorless.
Fortunately, the movie wisely avoids the clichés of
false redemption or a phony happy ending. The last few scenes, as Claire
confronts her grief, offer only a glimmer of hope that she might be on a path
to healing. What's far more authentic and believable is not that she’s getting
better, but just capable enough to carry on.
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