"Cake": Depression and Pain

I like it when an actor or actress who hasn't really convinced me with their work suddenly appears with a piece that shatters that image and demonstrates all their potential.

This is what happened with this movie and Jennifer Aniston in this case. It's not that I judge her as a bad actress, but from seeing her so often in light comedy roles, it made me think she wasn't capable of giving anything extra.

In Cake: A Reason to Live, that image dissipated to give way to a tremendous interpretation of a lawyer who suffers from chronic pain and who is also going through a very strong depressive period. Seeing Aniston without makeup, emaciated and full of scars, was a powerful shock, but loaded with a reality that I didn't expect.

Directed by Daniel Barnz and written by Patrick Tobin, this drama shows us a reality that, despite being very present in society, we don't see every day. How to deal with the loss of a loved one, the suicide of a friend, and the aftermath of a car accident, all at the same time, can overwhelm anyone, and in this case, Aniston finds refuge in an addiction to analgesics, which, rather than helping, completes a picture that is sinking her more into the dark side.

I really didn't know this movie from 2015, and I found it in the PlutoTv movie offer, and it just caught my attention to see Aniston on the cover looking very emaciated, which prompted me to see how much she could offer from another point of view than what her public is used to. And rightly she was showered with nominations for different awards, because it is a jewel that adorns her world-famous fame.

We see reality from a point of view in which the one who has everything material, has nothing of what they really want and need, demystifying the thought that money is everything.

Silvana's character is the containment we always need: an empathetic woman, beyond her condition as a lady of service. What I didn't like was using the stigma of the Mexican who goes north to seek fortune that they show at some point in the film, because up to that point, it really looked more like a life companion than a domestic employee.

Faced with Claire's obsession with the suicide of her therapy partner, a range of realities are shown that seek not only to redeem the suicide, but also the character of Aniston, who, after several conversations with this "ghost", ends up understanding that life goes on, and the opportunities to rebuild her life are closer than she imagined.

Cake is a reflective movie, that sinks with us and makes us think about our internal demons, giving us a breath in the face of the adversities we face or those we have already gone through and have sequelae.

And why is it called that? You really have to watch it until the end, the meaning is much stronger than you could imagine.

Photo by: Imdb photo gallery.