Illness and disability have long been a fascination of girls’
literature: Author Lurlene McDaniel made a career of killing off
diseased teenagers. Katy Carr fell off a swing and into a
character-building paralysis in What Katy Did. And Beth March
never did recover from that scarlet fever. But while they don’t always
survive their afflictions, the girls in these books were always
improved by them, becoming stronger,
kinder, and better.
This adolescent,
illness-can-only-make-you-stronger-or-sometimes-kill-you
approach
is on abundant display in Mary Stuart Masterson’s directorial debut,
The Cake Eaters—not merely because a young disabled girl
is a main character, but because the girl’s condition exists only as a
narrative foil, a figurative pommel horse to be vaulted in a triumphant
handspring of the spirit.
The girl doing the metaphoric vaulting is actress Kristen Stewart,
who’s best known for her role as vampire-bait Bella in Twilight,
and presumably is the only reason this trivial little film received any
kind of distribution. Stewart plays Georgia, who’s afflicted with a
fatal, degenerative nerve disorder that causes her to constantly
tremble and occasionally fall down. The grim set of Stewart’s mouth as
she struggles to navigate a room on her own is our only hint that this
condition is anything more than an excuse for Georgia to cling to the
arms of nearby young men, namely Beagle (Aaron Stanford), with whom
she’s decided to lose her virginity.
The idea of a terminally ill teenager who’s powerfully interested in
sex is a compelling one—but Jayce Bartok’s script is so stiff
that not even a terrifically fierce performance by Stewart generates
sufficient interest. The framework is here, but the human
details—the ones that might make this story into something more
than just one more quirky indie dramedy—aren’t.