When Claire Bennett is asked to follow the other members of her touchy-feely support group as they express shock and sadness over the loss of Nina one of their members who jumped to her death, she ruthlessly responds with sarcasm, finishing with ‘Way to go, Nina!’ The annoyingly patronizing Social Worker leading the session is horrified, but it actually gets the audience in Claire’s corner from the off.Claire is in constant chronic pain as the result of a very nasty accident and its very clear that the scars she sports on her face and body are not the only ones she has. Between swallowing handfuls of any pain killers she can blag off any of her doctors, or get illegally from Mexico, she spends her days and nights ensuring that her deep depression manifests in hating herself and making everyone around her miserable too. Besides the Support Group leader, she has also pushed away her husband and her physical therapist simply because they wanted to help her.
Silvana her middle-aged Mexican housekeeper who waits on her hand and foot in her very comfortable LA house, is the only person that Claire can tolerate. Despite the abuse she heaps on Silvana, the Housekeeper treats her precious Mrs Bennett with genuine affection and constantly goes way beyond the call of duty.
As the story unfolds and Claire becomes obsessed with Nina’s death she starts gets visitations from the dead girl’s ghost who seems set on pushing Claire into making the decision that is obviously consuming her about her own life. The one bright spot in her life now (and in the film) is her playful encounter with Nina’s husband Roy when, in a thinly veiled excuse, she inveigles an invitation into his house and then subsequently into his life too. Suddenly we see that underneath Claire’s sad state of affairs there is a spirited and wicked sense of humor which shows that she has not always been the ‘raving bitch’ that she labels herself as now.The back story to what caused her plight is not hard to fathom out but it comes a little late for us to still be routing for Claire as we started out in the beginning. She was just a tad too angrily self-absorbed all the way through for us to really accept her now as a warm and tenderhearted person.
The story by Patrick Tobin (his 2nd screenplay) is really too thin for director Daniel Barnz to have made a more substantial and credible movie. It simply relies on just too many cliched plot strands which makes it tough for us to totally empathise with Claire’s predicament, especially when he leaves it to the last minute to try to redeem her character.
Jennifer Aniston gives a powerful performance that she has obviously poured her whole heart and soul into. It’s not easy to accept that this beautiful actress with her beguiling smile can play dull and depressed, but she can and she does, and her performance is equal to other actors who pipped her to the post for the Oscar nomination that she so craved.
The wonderful Adriana Barraza (Oscar nominated for ‘Babel’) playing Silvana took advantage of the fact that her hysterical rant when she finally turned on Claire, was one of the best scenes in the movie. Also in the cast were Mamie Gummer as the Physical Therapist, handsome Aussie Sam Worthington as Roy, and Felicity Huffman as the Social Worker. Ms Huffman’s hubby William H. Macy also popped up in a small pivotal role.
It’s a small indie movie about depression that could leave you depressed if you expect it to be better than average.
