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Friday, January 23, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW Cake
 The Chronic Pain Of Southern Californian Suburbia?

Jennifer Aniston as Claire in Daniel Barnz's tragicomedy "Cake".  Cinelou Films
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Friday, January 23, 2015

 Daniel Barnz's tragicomedy "Cake" is limited in its aspirations and focus on the relatively charmed life of L.A. mother Claire (Jennifer Aniston), whose son is killed in a car accident.  Claire belongs to a chronic pain counseling group.  She develops a fascination and morbid curiosity with deceased group member Nina (Anna Kendrick), who committed suicide.  Claire visits Nina's widower Roy (Sam Worthington) and tries to understand.  She's haunted by Nina who possesses a cake, a symbolic character which fits the hallucination but not the film overall.  Understanding Roy's loss through Nina may be a conduit to her revisiting and coping with her own.

The story of "Cake" is less about Claire than the chronic pain and obsession with Nina she can't shake.  "Cake" is supposed to be about an incomplete person struggling mightily to get steady in order to get back on her bike (or in her car) and ride it.  The trouble is, "Cake" drifts away from its purported anchor to become something else.  Sometimes this unfocused film turns on a dime from scene to scene. 

The problem is that "Cake", buried in its own misery and lack of self-awareness as a "character's rebirth" film, looks and feels more like a movie about a movie about a tormented person struggling to get back on her bike.  The film is easily self-distracted as if self-medicating in the process.  "Cake" is intoxicated, not intoxicating.  Its sense of attention-deficit should have been invested in developing an undeveloped script.

"Cake" features Ms. Aniston's fine, roughly-hewn, physical performance but her great work is trapped by Mr. Barnz's (and screenwriter Patrick Tobin's) sense of safety and convention.  The lack of overall ambition in a moody, passionless "Cake" hurts the L.A. stage upon which the jarring, abrupt and schleppy Claire sluggishly exists.  "Cake" feels staid, brittle and uncertain, as unsteady as its lead character.  Horribly outsizing surrounding characters (her counselor capitulates to vodka), Claire is an outlier amidst bland characters, some of whom are actually more interesting than she. 

Consequently "Cake" has to make up for its deficiencies by filling its gaps and narrative shifts, but it never overcomes them.  The film showcases Claire puttering around in her sweats like a drunken but intrigued anthropologist, journeying to Tijuana, and to the 110 freeway in L.A.  Why did Nina jump?  Where did she jump from?  What time did she jump?  Did you see her jump?, Claire asks.  This investigation is a set of 20 questions for Claire, whose questioning recalls a cuckolded movie man confronting an offending woman.  "Where did you screw?  Was he better than me?  Was he bigger than me?"  Much of "Cake" is more desperate and barren than Claire is.  The proportion between the two is well out of whack.

Many American movies, and one as independent as this, often don't posses the fluid writing that intelligently or effectively integrates lead and surrounding characters.  The lack of enervation and innovation stifles the actors.  Ms. Aniston's admirable labors are smothered by clichéd, stereotypical white suburbanite mom behaviors.  Exhibit A: the gardener Claire has sex with.  "No, no.  From behind," she wearily advises her Latin magazine pin-up employee. 

Claire looks disengaged as her Latin locomotive man thrusts away.  Don't get me wrong: Claire is free to have sex, of course.  That's her obvious prerogative.  It's just that the sex itself feels more like a device to keep an audience's attention rather than a character trait.  We are told Claire is promiscuous and it may or may not be tied to her loss.  Whatever Claire's disposition, "Cake" reigns in her sexuality.  It's a cruel double-edged sword aimed at the neck of its female protagonist by its male creators.  The lack of sex and the crimping of Claire's sexual identity makes the one sex scene "Cake" has look showy, throwaway-cheap or unnecessary, as opposed to an attachment of trait the way films like "Wild" or "Gone Girl" showed sex as a key and relevant behavioral trait of its central female characters.

The film's spaces are filled with things that happen to Claire that aren't interesting on either a film or character basis.  The stage she staggers across is wobbly and fragile, but too easily so.  Ms. Aniston brings a suppressed fire and disdain to Claire.  She shapes and claws Claire into granite, a breathy figure blunted by life's rough edges and experiences.  This is the work, the dramatic work, which Ms. Aniston rarely gets -- but always excels at. 

"Friends With Money" and "The Good Girl" are other examples of what Jennifer Aniston can do when she's given the chance.  She's far better an actor than she's given credit for.  Like many women in Hollywood, the limited type of role she is offered unfairly typecasts and defines her.  I wish Ms. Aniston would get rid of her agent.  Better yet, Hollywood's powerful male guard should stop trapping female talent in weak, thankless positions on the big screen.  Cinema quality declines as a result.

"Cake" says that the banal and physically-challenged life Claire leads is blocked, or at least fueled, by past torments and tragedies.  But the film doesn't know how to deal with or digest them.  The very last scene in "Cake" is reductive and deceptive.  It's a scene that's a figurative rescue scene -- not a literal one -- for the sake of the film's resolution and the misery of its own misdirection.  The end of "Cake" is a disingenuous conclusion it doesn't deserve.  What's most reductive though, is the shallow writing that places characters in suspension and sidelines their issues surviving in a sprawling, 21st century L.A.  It's a shame Ms. Aniston's great work is wasted and the actors aren't utilized the way they should be.

Mr. Tobin's writing reveals a limitation in characters and their relevance to each other and the main story.  Dimension is squandered.  The actors, save Ms. Aniston, aren't able to overcome the leaden, unimaginative script that holds them back.  The director may have restricted them.  As I watched I felt the restrictions and limitations because "Cake" feels restricted.  The characters are potted plants that react to Claire but don't authentically populate her life or define the world that the oft-dependent Claire lives in.  You'd think that Claire, who spends most of "Cake" in a horizontal position, would need more help from surrounding characters than Mr. Tobin's script provides.  Or not.  Claire is removed, anesthetized.  But so is "Cake", even as its styling, however subtle or blatant, is forced.

Adriana Barraza, who plays Silvana, Claire's put-upon Latino housekeeper, is amplified in all the wrong ways.  Silvana occasionally shouts in fusillades of Spanish.  The film sometimes doesn't subtitle her vocalized anger at Claire's stasis or entitlement.  Ms. Barraza's regrettable theatrics are applied for melodramatic effect.  There's no appreciable or sincere look at Claire and Silvana's relationship.  Any examination of their relationship is via stereotypical lenses and interactions governed by socioeconomic position and title.  One scene reeks of the white privileged patronage Mr. Barnz milks for effect to highlight Claire's feel-good deed and conscience-salver.  It's an exploited trophy-winning salute that plays awkwardly, not unlike the Jessica Tandy-Morgan Freeman relationship in "Driving Miss Daisy."

In the end "Cake" left me vacant, nonplussed and unfulfilled.  Mr. Barnz's film is a monotone, tame and unremarkable experience, one best spent at home watching on Netflix or on your phone on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  That's the first time I've said that about a film: phone movie material.  "Cake" may be the first big screen film tailor-made exclusively to watch on your iPhone.  "Cake" is a harmless, small-scale fit that may play better there than it does on the big screen or small one.  "Cake" is economical, unobtrusive and intimate.  Looks like a "phone movie" to me.

Also with: Chris Messina, Felicity Huffman, Mamie Gummer, Britt Robertson, Lucy Punch, William H. Macy.

"Cake" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language, substance abuse and brief sexuality.  Its running time is one hour and 41 minutes.
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