“Cake”

In Daniel Barnz’s Cake, rom-com queen Jennifer Aniston is given the chance to stretch her acting muscles beyond the fluffy fodder for which she’s well-known. Aniston plays Claire Bennett, a woman suffering from constant physical and emotional pain, and the former Friends star seizes the opportunity to reach deeper into her acting skills and summon a dramatic portrait of grief. Even still, the film, which is at times honest and raw yet monotonous, offers little to support her richly layered performance. With restrained moderation, as well as a refined exactitude, Aniston makes Cake her own movie and its structural shortcomings become of lesser focus and importance.

The first noticeable thing about Aniston’s Claire is not her scarred, blemished face, despite what the film’s marketing materials may suggest. Focusing on the changes in her physical appearance is a major disservice to what Aniston achieves with Cake, as what immediately stands out about Claire is what’s under—and not on—her visage. Claire’s anger, which she releases via a disengaged stance and venomous tongue, is conveyed by Aniston with grounded humanism.

Cake opens with Claire attending a group-therapy chronic pain support group meeting, as they try to find closure over the suicide of one of their members, Nina (Anna Kendrick). While everyone voices their feelings over Nina’s sudden death, Claire disturbs the order with the sarcasm of non-emotional factuality—and, as a result of her bad behavior, she gets thrown out of the group. As she returns home, we witness the consequences of her physical injuries as she moans in severe pain and struggles with basic bodily movements. For Claire, who carries emotional baggage larger than any one of her scars, there is only one way to cope with her physical pain: to pop painkillers and treat herself and everyone around her profoundly badly.

Claire also feeds her growing addiction to pills by cheating her way around the medical system to get more drugs. She abuses the goodwill and devotion of her loyal housekeeper and caretaker Silvana (a scene-stealing Adriana Barraza, who’s superb in the role) by forcing Silvana to take her south of the border for an additional supply of pills. Claire refuses to cooperate with her physical therapist, knowingly sabotaging and delaying her already slow recovery. Her off-putting gruffness screams amplified self-pity of a person unable (or rather, unwilling) to recover from emotional trauma. Instead, we watch her quietly suffer, become obsessed with and haunted by the idea of Nina, and strike up an almost predatory friendship with her widower husband, Roy (Sam Worthington).

But Patrick Tobin’s dragging script falls short of the committed performance Aniston delivers. The story delays any clear reveal of Claire’s past for too long, leaving the audience in the presence of a stubborn character and inexplicable dreariness. Thankfully, Aniston and Barraza’s performances keep things interesting and find occasional dark humor in the awkwardness their situation holds. In one egregiously contrived scene, an unnamed man (William H. Macy) abruptly shows up at Claire’s door step during her first “good day” in a while to apologize for the accident he caused—finally revealing the traumatic event the film held too close to its chest for too long. But Aniston refuses to succumb to the film’s forced disclosure. Instead of showing off with exaggerated emotions, she maintains her restraint and earns even further respect within a highly calculated and poorly written scene.

Like the 2014 release The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Cake dares something that is usually deemed small and unworthy nowadays: to explore the emotional journey of an everyday woman dealing with issues of identity and personal significance. And despite all the film’s perceived smallness, Aniston makes you feel the weight of Claire’s quiet sorrow in a big way, even if Cake suffers on the whole for being undercooked.