Cake Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was starring Jennifer Anniston, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, it’s only afterwards that I discovered that this movie did receive some rather weak reviews but I thought it was a little bit harsh. Indeed, it was so refreshing to see Anniston finally doing something different and I thought she gave here a really solid performance. The rest of the cast was interesting as well, especially Sam Worthington and Anna Kendrick, even if most of them were stuck playing only one or two scenes. I also did appreciate the fact that they didn’t show or tell what exactly happened to Claire and Nina in details. Unfortunately, I would have to admit that I was still never completely sold after all. Eventually, in my opinion, the biggest mistake they made was that they never commit themselves to a specific tone and, as a result, the damned thing constantly switched between dark comedy and drama. I mean, both choices would have been fine but it seems that they didn’t have the balls to make a pitch-black comedy about such a dramatic subject. In a similar fashion, on the other hand, it seems they were scared that the subject matter might be too heavy so they would randomly throw some witty one-liners to lighten up the proceedings. However, this constant back-and-forth felt rather squeamish and it really didn’t do a service to a solid story and a solid main character which both had a lot of potential. On top of that, even though Claire’s actions were very often quite random (in a positive way), her story arc turned out to be seriously generic and predictable which probably didn’t help. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a solid drama and I think it is worth a look, especially if you want to see Jennifer Anniston doing something really different for once.

The ingredients are all there but the batter never mixes correctly in Cake. A stellar performance from its star cannot hide the deficiencies in the rest of the film, nor can it entirely keep you interested, as there’s no one and nothing for her to work with or against. Jennifer Aniston deserved all the accolades she got, and probably deserved that withheld Oscar nomination more than Felicity Jones’ long-suffering wife in The Theory of Everything, but there’s nothing else going on throughout Cake to invest in.

 

Cake treats the central event of what caused Aniston’s Claire to wind up as a chronic pain sufferer with the beginnings of one hell of a prescription pill addiction as a mystery, but what they think are breadcrumbs are actually gigantic signposts. By the time Cake gets around to unraveling the mysteries at its core, we’ve already not only figured them out, but met them with an indifferent shrug. This is what happens when all of the other characters are stick figures and blank slates for the main characters to act and project upon.

 

Why is it that primarily comedic actors only get props for doing drama? Aniston’s quirky, comedic work on Friends was career making, and she’s done plenty of respectable comedic film performances, but it’s typically films like The Good Girl and Friends With Money that crop as proof of her acting talents. None of this is to say that Aniston’s performance in Cake is not worthy of the reams of praise heaped upon it, but it needs to not be treated as some kind of heretofore unknown talent.

 

Aniston goes deep into the physicality of the character, and her choices to telegraph and demonstrate living with chronic pain feel correct in both the micro and macro levels. Even better is how someone dubbed “America’s Sweetheart” forsakes that likable image so completely and relishes playing someone so incredibly selfish, mired in grief, and frequently terrible in her self-destructive, sardonic actions. There’s no warm fuzzy feeling in her Claire. She’s a woman at a crossroads and sinking in emotional turmoil, and Aniston does her best to make the emotional catharsis of the ending work.

 

She can’t quite pull off the trick, but that’s got little to do with the strength of her work and more to do with the weakness of the script and the faux-deep directing choices. Cake doesn’t want to examine the outside world that’s pressing in on Claire’s privileged existence, and it reduces several Mexican characters to variations of the Magical Negro and its two male characters to gender-flipped supportive players with nothing much to say or do but act as a springboard. It’s Aniston’s show, and she makes a meal of it, but it’s a goddamn shame that nothing else rises to her level because then we really could have had something here.

"That's fucked-up."

"Like you."

If you invest yourself in this movie, you will be driven a little crazy by it, and at some point you'll probably wonder if it's just trying to take you for a ride, just trying to mess up your emotional regulation with no payoff in return, and there are stories like that, but this is not it. There's a payoff. 

You always have a choice of how you live your life. Always. 

Might be this is what I was expecting from Aniston from a long ago. Since break-up with Brad Pitt, probably after 'Marley & Me', she has not given any best performance. This is her best shot to till date, maybe in her whole career. She would have not won, but her snub from the Oscar nominee was not justified. Unlike men, who gets better by aging, women are the opposite. In the old days I used to like Aniston, but nowadays, I don't know. In this film she has done without makeup, well, that's an honest attempt.

Not a spellbinding narration, but it was all about Aniston's performance. There are a couple of cameo appearances, well, all the other character in the movie is like a cameo, including Sam Worthington's, but excluding our heroine. Worth watching this only for her performance, not for the story.

The past events should have been explained to let us know the truth along with the portrayal of the present. But it was kind of realism, I won't doubt about that, but sometime cinematic needs a proper detail rather than straightforward. Really a good movie, simultaneously not great as to praise the direction or the presentation that slightly missed the opportunity to be an awesome flick.

7/10

Glum depressive tale of a woman captivated by a friend's suicide. JA performs well but the story told takes way too much time to build up and get anywhere (which it doesn't really do).

I have to admit I didn't know much of anything about this story before checking it out. All I knew is that Jennifer Aniston went without make up for the role. I find her to be quite beautiful now rather than when she was young. Indeed she is still quite gorgeous to look at without makeup in my opinion. This is by far her best role and it seems to be extremely against type. The real scene stealer though is Adriana Barraza. There are few quite recognizable faces and names here some of which have surprisingly small amounts of screen time. It does drag on a little bit though. I kept sitting and wondering why the hell it was titled Cake until closer to the end. I thought the ending was a nice icing to the cake that is the film. There were several well done scenes that I really enjoyed throughout. I think it's worth checking out particularly if you are a big Jennifer Aniston fan.