21 May 2015

Cake (Daniel Barnz, 2014)

6.5/10
I wasn't expecting too much from this, and about half an hour in I was sure I was going to hate it. Jennifer Aniston stars as Claire, a pain-riddled, grief-stricken, drug-addicted woman who initially appears to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Another woman in her chronic pain sufferers support group, Nina, commits suicide, and Claire is fascinated by the incident to the point of being visited by Nina in hallucinations. Claire eventually tracks down Nina's windower, and the fact that he's blindingly handsome and charming and accepts crazy Claire and all her problems without a hitch...well the movie starts to shape up as another one of those dreadful things where all of a woman's problems are magically solved once she finally meets A Good Man.
Mercifully (and unexpectedly) the movie doesn't really take that path. That's not to say it's totally cliche-free, because it has its share of them, and much of the staging for the incidents that occur feel more like hacky screenwriter gimmicks and less like things that would actually occur to real people. But in the last act or so the movie does finally turn out to be an emotionally honest and rather sad portrayal of grief. I've never cared for Jennifer Aniston in anything but she does a very good job in a role that easily could have been histrionic and over-acted. No classic, but ultimately better than I thought it would be.

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