Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Adriana Barraza, Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington, Marnie Gummer, Felicity Huffman, William H. Macy, Chris Messina, Lucy Punch, Britt Robertson, Allan Moldono, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Misty Upham., Evan O’ Toole.
Nobody can snap a finger and make you better; nobody can get inside your head and see the grief that assists the pain that the body feels. When every movement feels like torture, even the briefest glimpse of something bright and hopeful only serves to remind what was lost. It is almost the perfect summing up for Jennifer Aniston’s latest film, Cake.
For Jennifer Aniston, Cake should mark a sea-change in the way that audiences will look at her on screen. For too long the spectre of Friends has overshadowed her career, and whilst it was one of the best American comedies of the last forty years, since it has ended, the films that have come her way have not lived up to the potential that resides in this hugely popular actor. Aside from the 2005 thriller Derailed, every film has been on the cusp of being instantly forgettable, it is as if the film is only being made as a vehicle to keep Ms. Anniston in the public gaze, this is unfair to Ms. Aniston as she has so much more to offer than bitter-sweet comedy and being the cover girl for a million magazines. In Cake her ability and craft are finally stretched, is enhanced to the point of wanting to punch the air in the cinema and shouting out, “Yes, finally a director has got her from out of the comfortable shadow and given her a reason to breathe.”
Playing someone with the disabling effects of chronic pain is a hard task to master. In many films down the years it has not been a believable scenario, the actor just not portraying the every debilitating movement that comes with it in any way that looks real enough and can be quite an insult to any film goer who lives with it every day. In Jennifer Aniston’s portrayal of a woman who has lost so much due to a car crash, the pain is believable, it is truth wrapped in honesty and if the rest of the film was as good and as sensitive as Ms. Aniston’s performance then it would be in line for great things in 2015.
The film though, despite its very decent premise is awash with tedium and characters designed to serve no function but get from one scene to the other. In Sam Worthington, a man grieving the suicide of his wife, there is no real heart in his actions and the only other two believable characters throughout are Felicity Huffman’s well meaning but reigned in support group leader Annette, and Adriana Barraza as Jennifer Aniston’s Mexican maid and social crutch, Silvana.
The thought of suicide and chronic pain is not to be taken lightly and at times the makers of Cake seem happy to portray both aspects with great sensitivity but then ruin that process with unbecoming humour, it is a shame that the film was not allowed to nestle into the realm of serious truth rather than being a mixed bag of disparaging, almost unworthy, cinematography.
You can’t always have your cake and eat it, you do lose something when the gain is very high. For Jennifer Aniston this is a high point in her career, arguably the best performance on screen since her days in Friends, but in a film that yet again is not praiseworthy as it should be. Admirable and yet crushing.
Ian D. Hall