Hollywood as a whole expected Jennifer Aniston to get an Academy Award nomination for her starring role in the movie Cake. Unfortunately, she was passed over. Her character, Claire, is suffering from chronic pain and in a support group where she’s the only one who’s not all sunshine and sweetness. She hurts and she’s wearing her anger about it on the outside.Â
Claire is everything Rachel from Friends was not. In Friends, Aniston’s character started out naive and coddled and evolved into an independent woman and eventually a Mom. And although I’m delighted to see that Aniston can do more than flip her hair and purse her lips, it seems a little insulting to get all excited about it. I mean, she’s an actress, and comedy is hard – harder than drama sometimes. In comedy, timing and delivery are everything. If you don’t have that built into your DNA, you can’t be funny.
Cake isn’t funny. There are a couple of funny moments but we’re mostly going along with Claire as she becomes obsessed with the suicide of one of her support group members and copes with her constant pain by popping pills. We get the idea that whatever caused her injury is more traumatic than she’s prepared to admit and it’s revealed a little at a time. Only her longtime housekeeper, played by the wonderful Adrianna Barazza, defends Claire’s grumpy, bitchy approach to life. Still, Aniston somehow makes Claire likable and you only want her to be able to get up out of a chair without wincing.
The entire cast is terrific. Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington, Felicity Huffman, Mamie Gummer and William H. Macy who has a star billing but only a tiny role.
If you like to be told a story without all of the details given to you up front, if you don’t mind a lack of car chases and if you want to see a tabloid darling stripped bare in every way and give a performance that almost makes you forget she’s been famous forever, you’ll enjoy Cake. If all of that sounds like a hellish way to spend a couple of hours, like it did for Derek, avoid it!