As the praise for Jennifer Aniston’s performance in Cake continues to reverberate across awards season, it begs the question: Are voters bestowing these hosannas on the acting, or the makeup? I’ll submit that that the distinction lies with the latter, that it represents another case of misapplied plaudits.
Voting blocs love when actors step out of their comfort zones, and this particular comedic actress, marooned since Friends in shallow studio trifles, has never starred in a movie this dark. Never mind that it’s a compact, limited performance that actually exhibits less range than some of her better comedies, let alone her finest hour in 2002’s The Good Girl.
The point is that she looks like hell, with an unattractive coif and skin tarnished with scars and blemishes, and awarders love when pretty actresses uglify themselves for their art. At least some are realizing that it’s not enough: She was Oscar-snubbed in favor of Marion Cotillard because Cotillard was more deserving. Funny how that works sometimes.
Of course, Aniston does her best with what she’s given, which in this case is a relentlessly downbeat character study about a life ravaged by unaddressed grief and painkiller addition. She plays Claire Bennett, a middle-aged woman who lost a child in a car accident and a husband (Chris Messina) to divorce. She’s become addicted to Vicodin, Percocet and the like, ingesting them like M&Ms, obtaining them from unscrupulous physicians, hiding them behind picture frames and at the bottom of laundry baskets, and usually washing them down with wine. Chronic pain feeds chronic abuse of medication, rendering her one of countless slaves to the vicious cycle of pill dependence.
It’s also made her a pain to be around. She alienates her support group to the extent that she’s booted from its roster, and she only takes interest in her dedicated housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza, whose performance here is really the one to watch) when she needs a favor, whether it’s driving her to a nearby clinic or to a pharmacy in Tijuana, where she can smuggle pills across the border.
Cake is not a humorless slog, but even the comic relief is fundamentally sad, inspired by the shrapnel of wrecked lives and hopeless futures. Visions of suicide are never far from Claire’s mind, and she receives intermittent “visitations” from Nina (Anna Kendrick), a young woman from her support group who took her own life. Full-blown hallucinations not being a side effect of Claire’s medication, it’s hard to buy into these whimsical asides, which never gel with the slice-of-life naturalism of the rest of the movie.
Yet it’s easy to see why writer Patrick Tobin and director Daniel Barnz would want momentary escapes from the crushing self-destruction of Claire’s existence toward the radiance of Kendrick, who is full of life even in death. Claire is a doggedly unpleasant companion for most of the film, and if you see the film with an audience like mine, tsk-tsks of disapproval will titter through the theater, and you’ll wish you could reach into the screen and shake her out of her rut.
Said rut is credible in the sense that there are thousands (millions?) of Claires out there, but Tobin and Barnz have nothing to say in Cake beyond that superficial acknowledgment. Little about the psychology of pill addition is illuminated after 90 minutes, in part because the director respects the process of recovery without fully succumbing to its most desperate lows.
We’re always an arm’s-length away from Claire, observing her problems rather than experiencing them with her. So that when a supposedly poignant surprise greets Claire in the final moments, it barely registers on the visceral gut level. Cake remains ensconced on the surface of its issue, leaving us with a caustic pity party anchored by a performance that isn’t great so much as unfamiliar. And that’s not enough to carry a load this heavy.
CAKE. Director: Daniel Barnz; Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Adriana Barraza, Sam Worthington, Anna Kendrick, Felicity Huffman, Chris Messina, William H. Macy; Distributor: Cinelou; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most theaters