Jennifer Aniston’s Oscar campaign game was strong; she was the meeting point of an Academy catnip Venn diagram of Pretty Girl Goes Ugly and Comic Actor Goes Serious. Cake, too, has many award-bait merits – a biting anti-heroine, a debilitating illness that may or may not be psychosomatic, a tragic backstory, and William H. Macy. It may actually have been Cake’s simplistic, dramedy-by-numbers formula that just pushed Daniel Barnz’s (Beastly, Won’t Back Down) film from authentic, heartwrenching storytelling into a slightly manipulative, too-neatly wrapped package.
Aniston is nevertheless fantastic as Claire, a bitter and sarcastic woman suffering from chronic pain. Self-isolating and deeply resentful of the support groups and physical therapists that attempt to help her, it becomes clear that she’s comfortable being in pain; that she perhaps feels she deserves it.
Aniston’s face becomes the film’s strength – it is scarred from a frequently alluded-to, highly foreseeable tragedy, but it is also just the face of a woman in her forties, who has gone through immense emotional and physical suffering. Her skin is dull, her forehead lined, her face contorted into a near-constant frown – apart from when her wicked sense of humour shines through. Many will herald her performance as brave, which is a sad indication of how audiences now expect airbrushed perfection instead of reality.
However, in the search for real emotion, Barnz falls back on hollow tearjerker clichés, and an unforgivably predictable climax that retroactively erases Claire’s journey of any complexity. As Claire’s ghostly, self-destructive muse, Anna Kendrick feels like a miscast reach for younger audiences. That said, Adriana Barraza (Babel) is a delight as Claire’s empathetic Hispanic maid, who subtly highlights the deep privilege Claire has and may one day even enjoy.