"I don't know how I cut my toenails."-- Kevin Costner
In deference to Masterson, what she chooses for closure, for the knowledge her characters have in intimate terms that viewers are cut off from seeing in The Cake Eaters, these live inside the absences created in the film. Examples are in the opening arc, with Melissa Leo engaging young boys in 16 millimeter home movie style, framing itself on the inside of modern post production technology, evoking, much as the classics do, a wistful longing for less complicated and more magical moments, the memory of being so excited when a father went up on the rooftop to mimic reindeer, and his eldest child lie on her pillow, so excited that Santa was coming! Wakes in the morning and finds a doll figurine in a plastic flower bulb right where she slept, in awe that St. Nicholas could do such things. This is the omniscient Leo's secret smile for the unknown holder of the video camera, the outcry of pierced innocence as Aaron Stanford and Elizabeth Ashley drag Kristen to the flea market outhouse. What is Masterson suggesting about endurance? The toll of the things our internal censors screen us from sharing fall into so many variations. The plea of a spaz in a twenty inch nylon seat, bolted as these thing are to a titanium frame she bought at a cut rate deal from a long dissolved vendor, glued to telephone receiver, chasing a morbidly obese and disgustingly repulsive nominally Catholic woman over many blocks of voice mails, a so called attendant who had at least a half dozen clients, committing fraud against the state of Pennsylvania. She never did her hours, whatever Homemaker Services was paying her at the time, 8, 9 an hour. The quad in the Quickie was likely to see this vicious viper for an hour a week, assigned 12 by Medicaid waiver regulators, and the quad was, of course, down a power chair, waiting and waiting on our single option medically rationed traumatic nightmare we call Medicaid and Medicare eligibility. This blew up into a *serious allegations* incident with Homemaker Services, who have since created a clock in system. You don't see the punishing hostile environment Monica creates for her spastic enemy, spearing each other with venom, my retraction from how her erotic needs promulgate themselves on the Puerto Rican amputee that reads almost to the letter like the regressive episode with the paralytic husband and his caretaker in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but Google images are kind. Monica Carr is 300 lbs of toxic lard, and Nelson the double amputee is that 300 lb toxic lard in a state of decomposition. His incontinence is daily. She calls him "my baby." You want a visual of that physical intimacy in the way we are to imagine Beagle catching his father humping?
Before you make assumptions about my 19 years under Riverside's tactical assault, remember the interstices none of us can ever fully engage with each other. There are gradations to duress, and Monica made her contribution which is common in this paradigm. Never showing up and criminalizing my helplessness. I cannot create I dream of Jeanie through telecommunications, and her cowardice, moral shrink wrap, would be amusing if her body did not inspire very much in the idea of revulsion. When I see a roast pig on a spit, I like a crispy skin, not too willing to contemplate sentience.
The question remains if Masterson's attempt to be honest with the drollery of defeat overtakes her. Lacks just slightly too little of that movie magic.
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