Fanboys will be delighted this week when Avatar finally kills off New Moon's waning box office. Die, vampire, die! Semper fi, space marines! Hoo-ha. But where does that leave the Twi-hards? Sure, they'll get in line, like everyone else, to see The Movie The Changes Everything, but after that it's about 195 coffin-sleeps until Eclipse. The only solution? The Cold Case, which this week looks back at one Twilight star's even more indelible (if sadly underseen) performance from 2007.
Sure, you can veer off to Netflix for some pre-Edward R-Pattz in the unintentionally funny freakout The Haunted Airman. Same goes for Taylor Lautner busting a move as the titular fin-tastic fella of The Adventures Of Sharkboy And Lava Girl. But I'd stick with Twilight's true acting veteran, Kristen Stewart, who ever since Panic Room has rocked screens with a series of deft portrayals of teenage girls. Some Bella fans may have seen her in Adventureland, and some might even have ventured to appreciate her fine supporting work in What Just Happened and Into The Wild. Yet very few will have seen her best in 2007's The Cake Eaters.
In the film, Stewart plays Georgia, a 15-year-old girl afflicted with Friedreich's Ataxia, a degenerative nerve condition that causes her to walk clumsily and speak with a slur. While her movements and speech make her condition obvious, and she's well aware that her lifespan is limited, Georgia is a normal teenage girl. She's ready to rebel against her well-meaning but overbearing mother, who chronicles her daughter's life in her photos, and smitten with Beagle (Aaron Stanford), an unassuming young guy she meets at a flea market, and keen to get laid for the first time in case, you know, time runs out.
Stewart handles the physical challenge of Georgia superbly, and the emotional pull of the character is every bit as demanding. She's a strong-willed but vulnerable kid -- in other words, Anyteen -- who just happens to have a body she can't control and an annoyingly short shelf-life. She never pleads for understanding or sympathy; Georgia just wants to do her thing, whether it's getting a spiky new haircut or getting the shy Beagle to follow her lead in the roadside motel deflowering stakes.
While Stewart's Georgia is at the heart of The Cake Eaters, the film's success is that she's part of a beautifully conceived ensemble, with each character feeling fully formed, with their own motivations and points of view. Beagle can't come to terms with the news that his recently widowed dad, Easy (Bruce Dern), has for years been carrying on an affair with Marge (Elizabeth Ashley), Georgia's grandmother. Beagle is similarly resentful of his brother Guy (Jayce Bartok, who also contributed the screenplay), who deserted during mom's illness to pursue his rock dreams in New York but who has returned to try to pick up his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Stephanie (Miriam Shor). The Cake Eaters follows these three intertwined relationships with a remarkable ease, thanks to both Bartok's refreshingly bullshit-free script and natural, unfussy direction from Mary Stuart Masterson, the 1980s' peripheral Brat Pack actress making her feature debut.
The Cake Eaters isn't autobiographical, but it's deeply infused with Bartok's own experiences. His artist mom spent the last years of her life confined to a wheelchair, his family had a run-down studio in rural Pennsylvania, similar to the locations used in the movie. Other characters were inspired by his brothers and wife. As for Friedreich's Ataxia, Bartok selected it precisely because he knew nothing about it and wouldn't come to the subject with any preconceived notions. "When I had the honor of meeting some young women with FA," Bartok told Movieline. "I was floored by their rebellious spirit. I loved the idea that the one character that can't physically get around, is the one that accomplishes the most in the story, really."
This idea plays into the title, with "cake eaters" a phrase used when Bartok was growing up to describe those who'd made it in life -- ironic given that the characters don't have what they want, at least when we meet them.
All of the shone through strongly for Masterson, who'd been looking for a script to make her directorial debut. "I liked that the world of characters Jayce created had heart and an odd kind of innocence lacking in most films these days," she told me a few weeks back from her New York home, shortly after giving birth to her first child, a boy, and "my greatest production so far."
"The challenge with the material," she added, "in which not a lot happens, was to try to create a nuanced and true world in which change happens to these people in baby steps."
The other great challenge, of course, was finding the right teen actress for such a demanding role. Masterson, who was only familiar with Stewart from her work in Panic Room, flew out to Los Angeles to meet the then 15-year-old.
"Fifteen can be an awkward age, and you never know what side of adolescence a person will be on unless you sit down face-to-face with them," Masterson said. "I never asked to audition her. I just wanted to hear her thoughts about the character Georgia. She was totally poised and self-possessed. She was articulate and had an immediate affinity for the character. She had a ferocity about her -- a searing, searching thing that I think is truly at the core of who she is."
To nail the character, Masterson and Stewart reached out the Friedreich's Ataxia community, spent time with sufferers and their families, taped interviews. It paid off. "Kristen did her homework and it shows in her performance," Masterson said. "At almost every Q&A after screenings before Twilight came out, someone would ask where I found a girl with FA who could act."
Masterson applied the same eye for detail to the world the characters inhabit, which, while familiar feels just slightly off-kilter so as to give a sense of enclosure. "Because the material runs the risk of being TV movie-ish, I was very concerned about creating a realism and a sense of place that lacks sentimentality or theatricality," she told me. "Having said that, I referenced Norman Rockwell for some of the more formal compositions and color palette, so I knew we needed to embrace the inherent innocence and 'slowness' of the world while not allowing the characters to be self-consciously nostalgic. After all, they live in this reality, this place where no one appears to have a cell phone or computer or watch TV."
All well and good, but what was enormously frustrating for Masterson, Bartok and everyone involved in The Cake Eaters was that the lack of interest from distributors.
"We went through hell," Bartok recalled. "It was heartbreaking to see sold-out audiences at film festivals love the film and basically see distributors have no interest in it. When we played the Tribeca Film Festival and did get a lot of good reviews, I thought it was a shoe in for a distribution deal. Then a year of festivals went by, then another! I had basically, sadly come to terms with the fact that I would be burning DVD copies for friends forever."
Then, Twilight! And suddenly distributors were interested in a second bite of The Cake Eaters, gaining it a small theatrical release last March and a strong showing on DVD and on Showtime.
"It's funny to see all these Twilight fans talking about the film, some bashing it at first, then getting all geeky because Kristen is so great in the film," Bartok said. "A lot of people feel it's her best work."