Jennifer Aniston is an actress of considerable talent, but she is frequently type-cast in some pretty lame comedies that don’t reflect her range of abilities. Aniston was wonderful in The Good Girl and joined a very cool ensemble cast in He’s Just Not That Into You. She’s of course best known for her Rachel haircut and accompanying performances in the decade-long TV series, Friends. After Friends was over, viewers were forced to groan through popcorn movies like Horrible Bosses (and Horrible Bosses 2!) and We’re the Millers. There’s more, but let’s not belabor the point.
All this to say that I was looking forward to seeing her in the recent Cake, since for some odd reason it never came to local theaters. And I wasn’t disappointed. Cake offered Aniston another chance to show strength in a dramatic role. She’s Claire, a woman suffering from chronic pain. The movie opens with Claire and her chronic pain support group (check out Felicity Huffman subtly satirizing the overly compassionate group facilitator) processing the suicide of a fellow group member. While others are tearful, Claire is wracked with anger and demands answers surrounding the death. We’re introduced to how Claire operates: she’s snappish, irritable, and shrewd. Aniston brings the themes of grief, loss, physical pain and addiction together in her character study.
In fact, one of the most surprising and gratifying elements of this film is that we get no backstory upfront. The backstory comes in small bits, and much of it is not directly stated. The viewer is able to wonder about what happened, and those question marks add tension and weight to the story.
We are able to piece together the events that brought Claire to this point in her life, largely by the role of her housekeeper, aide, nurse and companion, Silvana, played amazingly by Adriana Barraza, who we know mostly from Amores Perros and Babel. She also had the guts to play a part in my favorite black comedy, Burning Palms. (It’s dark.) Joining Barraza in the supporting cast are Chris Messina (as Claire’s husband), Anna Kendrick as Nina who committed suicide, Sam Worthington who plays Nina’s husband, and William H. Macy who plays a villain. And with even smaller roles, but adding considerable interest to the film, are Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter), Lucy Punch, and Misty Upton.
I wish more critics appreciated Cake as much as I did. The movie covers a lot of ground, and while some who saw the movie might think that it spreads itself too thin, I like to view it as a slice of life where the grief, loss, addiction are not neatly compartmentalized, but rather flow through the film’s characters in overlapping patterns.
I hope that with Cake, Jennifer will begin anew as a dramatic actress—it’s clear that these roles stretch and challenge her, and give many gifts to her viewers. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]
Drama
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 4/21/15
