Cast as a cranky, depressed woman suffering from chronic pain, Cake represents Jennifer Aniston’s first low-budget, indie-style film since 2006’s Friends with Money, offering the star her most dramatically challenging part since either the previous movie or The Good Girl (2002). Covered in prosthetic scars and made up to look as dowdy and unglamorous as someone in cashmere sweatpants can look, Aniston submits an honest, sturdy performance.
Scenes at Claire’s home gradually reveal the state of the nation for this troubled woman. Addicted to prescription painkillers, she lives alone in a large, tastefully appointment house, her ex husband (Chris Messina) having moved out some time ago. Occasionally, she has carefully positioned, loveless sex with her gardener Arturo (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo).When she gives him a box of unused children’s toys she no longer needs, it’s an obvious clue that Claire once had a child who’s now dead, probably killed in the same accident that mangled her body.Set in Los Angeles, which it evokes with a resident’s sensitivity to the area’s social geography, the film opens at a support group for sufferers of chronic pain. It transpires that one regular, Nina (Anna Kendrick), has committed suicide, and facilitator Annette (Felicity Huffman) asks each of the members to share what they feel. When it’s time for Claire Simmons (Aniston) to tell an imaginary Nina what she thinks, she rips into the dead woman, condemning her decision to end her life in such a way as to cause maximum distress to her family. The others are so upset by her honesty they later politely ask her to take her pain elsewhere.
Her main support, however, is Silvana (Adriana Barraza, easily the movie’s MVP), Claire’s Mexican housekeeper. Silvana maternally clucks over her employer, taking on the chin Claire’s sometimes brusque comments and ferrying her around town when needed, even as far Tijuana to pick up extra Percocets. The fact that Claire always insists on having her passenger seat fully reclined to ease her back pain marks a nicely observed detail, paid off poignantly at the end. Nina starts making hallucinatory appearances in Claire’s dreams, urging her to kill herself too. Seeking to exorcize this demon, Claire goes to the dead woman’s house and meets Nina’s husband, Roy (Sam Worthington, speaking with his native Australian accent for a change). Like Claire, Roy is a tightly wound ball of fury, filled with rage at his dead wife for leaving him alone to raise their pre-school-age son. He and Claire strike up a non-physical relationship and something romantic looks possible, but it only takes an encounter with someone connected to the tragedy to shatter Claire’s locked-down composure.
