Have your cake and (try to) eat it, too

Thoughtful and pretty, The Cake Eaters is a noble but unfinished effort

By Ashley Harris
Published: March 19th, 2009 | 10:55am

Beautifully shot and well-acted, The Cake Eaters has potential as a unique look at sex, love, death, infidelity, and disability. Indeed, Mary Stuart Masterson’s directorial debut presents unusual insights into each of these hefty topics. Unfortunately, it bites off a little more than it can chew, causing the primary story line — about a budding romance between a disabled and dying fifteen-year-old girl and a lonely but sensitive young man — to suffer.

We are introduced to Georgia, played by Kristen Stewart, as she is photographed topless and convulsing by her domineering (and, frankly, irritating) artist mother. Given that Stewart is hot and seizures are scary, it is apparent from the get-go that we are in for a series of difficult moments.

Soon, Georgia meets Beagle, a cook in the school cafeteria, and selects him to deflower her. Anxious to "lose it," Georgia pursues Beagle with a remarkable lack of self-consciousness that reads in turns both desperate and wise. The film's strongest anchor lies in the painfully honest interactions between the two as they embark on a relationship earmarked by illness and inevitable death.

As Beagle's widowed father, Bruce Dern delivers his lines with just the right amount of detachment to allow his love affair with Georgia's hard-talking grandmother to take on an unexpected sweetness that almost outshines that of their younger counterparts. Alas, Stewart pulls her weight both figuratively and literally as she painstaking maneuvers her ailing — but still youthful — body across the screen.

Amidst the nihilistic images of teenagers that tend to populate our television and movie screens, The Cake Eaters is a striking portrayal of an adolescence governed by compassion and the thirst for experience. It even manages to make caretaking look mildly hot. Certainly the film, whose soundtrack was provided by Duncan Sheik, strives to achieve a balance that is not too casual or too melodramatic in its approach to the challenging subject matter.

If only the concept and cast of characters been simplified, The Cake Eaters could have been a great success. Instead, each compelling moment is quickly diverted to a secondary or tertiary plot line, leaving the entire story lacking cohesion. A few of the characters were so underdeveloped that I was left wondering why they were included in the first place. Meanwhile, we never really learn what becomes of Georgia and Beagle. It’s worth seeing, but wait for the rental.