Movie Review: Cake with Jenn Aniston

Last year Jennifer Aniston stepped outside of acting comfort zone and gave, what I thought, was one of the more real performances of her career. The sad part is that Cake was almost universally panned, opened poorly and it hurried itself to Netflix, where I had the chance to watch it during my recent break.

It was delicious, like a good cake should be. It’s a simple film, taking place in L.A. with just “Claire” played by Jennifer Aniston. This movie is the story of a woman who through an accident we don’t know much about suffered severe injuries causing her to be in nearly unbearable chronic pain. In short, Jen plays a woman struggling with chronic pain after a bad car accident. The film opens with her strange habits like only riding in cars laying down, moving about stiffly like a plastic mannequin, and her consistent use of pills. The woman is a bit of a sorry case because she has driven everyone away, even her loving husband and relies entirely on her long-suffering maid for everything from rides to an illicit trip to Mexico for pain pills when her supply runs low. In the beginning of the movie she is focused on her own suffering and isn’t even invested in her own recovery and healing. The only pleasures in her life include a never-ending wine supply and a masturbatory-like sexual visit from her gardener. We find out as the movie progresses that she lost her son of only 5 or 6 in the accident leaving plenty of guilt and that pain is excellently explored. The only thing that jars her out of her funk and from her pain is a woman from her chronic pain group (after they dismiss her) who commits suicide, as she explores her dead group-mates life she explores and learns about her husband and her little boy, the mirroring is quite impressive to her own life and that mirroring inspires her to make amends, invest in her healing process, and begin to break through the wall of pain.

This is an excellent exploration of chronic pain and the things that those sufferers face. Chronic pain is such a quiet, subtle, and insidious disease that many people simply don’t understand it and this movie does a great job or exposing it. The real gem here is you get to see JA not as a love-struck rom-com queen but as a real and serious actress. Her body isn’t perfect, she has scars on her face and on her body. She seduces her gardener for some attention on account of desperation. She is real. I think that is why the film was panned. It is hard for an actress to pull down the veneer and show some reality even it is in a role on screen. For the first time, I actually felt like I knew who JA was as a human being. She was real. Let’s face it, America doesn’t like reality. We like our magazine covers airbrushed and our leading ladies perfect like Mary Poppins. Cake was anything but that and I loved every second of its artistic ascent and denouement.

It’s on Netflix and I highly recommend.