Cake

In Daniel Barnz's title and closing credits almost all the ‘A’s’ are lying down. That’s an emblem of heroine Claire who has been scarred and crippled by the loss of her young son and her own physical injuries in a car accident. She lies back when she’s driven by her housekeeper Sylvana, even when her posture leads to investigation at the Mexican-US border. Lying back makes her seem like she's in her coffin already. It also saves her from looking through the windshield, where she might relive the vision of that accident. Only at the end does Claire exert the will to sit up straight. The film shows the process by which she rises from her collapse. 

In the chronic pain management group Claire lacks the others’ emotional engagement and empathy. She alone refuses to risk an emotional engagement with the leader, when she portrays the recent suicide Nina. Claire alone refused to cry at the living Nina’s regret at not having made a birthday cake from scratch for her six-year-old son. Claire assumes her pain gives her the right to be a bitch or “the evil witch.” Expelled from the group, she works around to apologizing to the leader she’d abused. Her peace offering — a Costco vat of vodka — shows her new sense of the pain management group leader’s own problems. 

Claire works through her issues by becoming involved with the suicide. She imagines visits with Nina’s ghost, visits Nina’s widower Roy and meets their little son Casey.  After visiting the scene of Nina’s plunge she dreams of her own suicide. As she starts to relate to Roy and Nina Claire pulls out of herself and starts to care for others. When she’s visited by the repentant man who caused her loss Claire’s violent attack embarrasses her before Casey and Roy. That marks a turning point away from her self-absorption. She picks up a runaway girl, hires her to bake a cake from scratch — then lets her get away with the theft of her purse and cash. Finally Claire can feel for others.

Roy’s engagement with his son and his patience with Claire contrast to her self-concern. So too his balance, as when he says “I’m not bothered” whether or not the strange woman is a stalker. He pointedly does not take advantage of Claire when she needs to sleep chastely with him. As Sylvana notes, Claire’s self-concern drowns out any sense of her ex-husband Jason’s suffering.

In a potential suicide scene with Nina on the railway tracks, Claire finally manages to deal with her unearned guilt over her son’s death. “I was a good mother,” Nina’s ghost forces Claire to admit. The same scene triggers Sylvana’s overdue outburst at her employer’s selfishness. If Claire is the film’s subject and emotional center, Sylvana is the moral centre, an employee who knows her daughter is right about Claire’s stupidity, bitchiness and exploitative nature, but feels for her and stands by her nonetheless, until she sees the railway suicide attempt. With an unemployed husband, a disrespectful unwed nurse daughter and her own underpaid job Sylvana is a model for subordinating her own misery to others’.  She understands Claire's loss and confusion enough to retrieve the boxes of toys Claire gives the handyman.

     There’s a foreshadowing of Claire’s ultimate reform in the Tijuana lunch scene. Claire sees Sylvana embarrassed at her girlhood friends’ insulting attitude and rescues her by thanking her for the lunch and taking her off. The potential to feel and to feel for others has been in Claire, but stifled by her indulgence in grief and self concern. Until the actual cakes are mentioned or seen, the title is an emblem of her self-indulgent pain. For Claire the indulgence is initially negative, selfish grief, until her gifts to the runaway and Casey show her finally reaching out to feel and to care for others. The proper indulgence of cake is celebratory, generous and the enjoyment of life.