5/10

The battle back from a life changing event can be a long and torturing one. Director Daniel Barnez (Beastly) newest film is the story of pain pill addict, Claire Simmons (Jennifer Aniston). Claire is left picking up the pieces after her best friend in her support group, Nina, (Anna Kendrick) has committed suicide. Claire’s look into Nina’s life makes her take a step back and reflect on the life altering event that destroyed her life in a flash. “Cake” is certainly Barnez best effort to date, but it’s not an unblemished one. While this cake does have many layers, the film peters out by the third act leaving a bad taste in your mouth, and never wanting seconds. One aspect that did impress me was the performance of Aniston. She is at the point in her career where her characters seem to blend together, but in Claire she gets to finally unleash some of the typecast anger that she has been stuck in for decades. Claire isn’t the most morally structured woman, but there is something about her story that you feel drawn in to learn why her life is the way it is. Slowly, the pieces start to unravel the kinds of things she lost, and that feeling played emotionally well of never being able to recover. I do think this is Aniston’s best performance to date. I only wish that she had a script that knew the kind of reaction it wanted to grasp from it’s audience. For one, the film never really decides whether it’s a dark comedy or a dramatic frailty piece. There are many scenes where the ghost of Anna Kendrick is haunting Jennifer, and it feels silly and out of place with the kind of material these characters are dealing with. A film i can compare this to is the 2002 film, “28 Days” starring Sandra Bullock. That movie’s comedy worked because the film started off silly to begin with, and never had to mature to it’s subject in the field of alcoholism. In “Cake”, the comedic tones are there, but they just aren’t funny when matched with suicide, drug abuse, and even manslaughter. Kendrick is charming as usual, but her character just doesn’t fit a film like this. The title of the film is another thing that bothers me. Cake is shown twice in the movie, that’s it. We don’t learn that the protagonist has an addiction to it, or even anything out of the ordinary, it’s just there. It would be like making a film that shows a front yard a couple of times and calling the film “Grass”. I think Barnez could’ve tried a little harder with an overall effort to match that of the breakthrough performance his leading lady casts. The ending didn’t do much for me. There were several storylines that didn’t get wrapped up. One particular storyline featured William H Macy for three minutes, and then we never see him again. I can’t reveal much for spoiler purposes, but it would’ve been nice to receive some closure for Claire on that front. When the screen fades to black, it feels like one of those endings where the writer had a nice idea, but didn’t know where to end it. Overall, “Cake” is nothing above a rental. I could understand people wanting to see it, and they will be rewarded with a different layer (Pardon the pun) to Aniston as an actress. If you like Jen, i would say give it a shot. Otherwise, it’s easily forgettable mess that never takes any chances with the serious material it presents.