As seen at the
2007 San Diego Film Festival:
Mary Stuart
Masterson’s The Cake Eaters is an overly simplistic and
obnoxiously manipulative melodrama, the antithesis of what you’d
expect from a movie that played the festival circuit as much as
it did. The film employs the great young talents of Kristen
Stewart and Aaron Stanford in its lead roles—likely the reason
festivals accepted it—but ultimately wastes them on one
artificial situation after another. Stewart plays Georgia, a
teenager suffering from Friedriech's Ataxia, a disease that
affects the nervous system. Knowing she may not have long before
her health escapes her, Georgia becomes desperate to lose her
virginity to any willing participant. Stanford’s character,
twentysomething local-boy Beagle, is the only guy both deluded
and compassionate enough to grant Georgia her wish. What ensues
is a plot that uses Friederiech’s Ataxia as one of many ploys
for Lifetime-style heart-wrenching. Stewart tries her best, but
she cannot escape that Masterson and writer Jayce Bartok use her
character’s disease as a plot-gimmick, never crafting a
believable world around it. The physicality of Friederich’s
Ataxia may be present in Stewart’s performance, but it’s only
there to provide the necessary amount of “offbeat” for the movie
to be considered an offbeat romance. While the premise may sound
provocative on paper, it’s presented like that of any
standard-issue melodrama. If it weren’t for the always-welcome
(though here exploited) presences of Stewart and Stanford, the
movie would be downright insufferable. Self-important and just
icky all around, The Cake Eaters is better left unseen.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 10.4.2007
Screened on:
9.29.2007 at the Pacific Gaslamp 15
in San Diego, CA.
The Cake Eaters is Not Rated and runs
95 minutes.
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