Aniston's range as an actress is much narrower than Vaughn's. She specializes in the tiny nuances of an utterly normal girl responding to a world she encounters one nut at a time. In essence, Aniston is always "saying," "Why is this happening to someone like me?!" which is what makes her right for TV sit-com. Her expressions are always appropriate, but never more than that. There's no excess to her, no richness. Aniston is a low-carb comedienne, efficient but hardly one to set off cravings.
Brooke doesn't react in The Break-Up, however, she provokes. Gary is the one who reacts, to Brooke's semi-articulated demands and idiotic ploys, which suggests, among other things, that the movie has been cast backwards (even more so than 50 First Dates). The further problem is that while Brooke may be right about Gary, she engages in junior-high-level stratagems to get him back. That doesn't make her a romantic heroine, it makes her an ironic protagonist, someone whose faults we might possibly identify with, except that Aniston's persona isn't expansive enough to identify with if the character she's playing isn't openly likable.
Nicole Holofcener's Friends With Money
That's what makes Aniston the dent in Nicole Holofcener's Friends With Money. She plays Olivia, a former teacher who lost her sense of vocation as the result of a two-month fling with a married man that she can't get over. So she's working as a house cleaner, a job she can perform while smoking pot all day. In one sense, Olivia is too "nice," e.g., she's can't stick to her price when a rich guy haggles over her hourly rate, and when she takes a guy she's dating to work with her she not only can't refuse to give him the cut he insists on, she doesn't stop dating him afterwards. At the same time, however, she's parasitic, amoral: she goes through her client's drawers, in one case using a vibrator that she finds, and she's not above stealing an expensive cosmetic cream that she likes but can't afford.
The movie sets the openly lost singleton Olivia at the low end of a gamut of female friends who are all married and rich (Christine: Catherine Keener), richer (Jane: Frances McDormand), and richest (Franny: Joan Cusack), but not necessarily happy. At the end of the movie, Olivia gets what her friends have, without looking for it or deserving it especially, and this should be some kind of crowning irony, but Aniston gives us so little sense of what Olivia could be that it's hard to know how to react.
Article comments
1 - Chris Evans
Disagree with you about Aniston. She's an incredibly underrated actress. Yeah, she's no Nicole Kidman--you won't see her playing Virginia Woolf anytime soon, but when she's in the right role she's golden. I thought she was great in Friends With Money as well as in The Good Girl which is one of my favorite films of all time.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Chris. I figured Aniston couldn't have made a zillon dollars per episode on Friends for 10 years w/o picking up a lot of fans. Actually, I like her better than Nicole Kidman, who strikes me as waxy and pose-y. I like Aniston in her range, it just strikes me as a small-screen range. The audience with which I saw Friends With Money clearly responded to McDormand more than to Aniston.
3 - Chris Evans
Lmao! I loved Frances McDormand. She's brill in EVERYTHING.
4 - Alan Dale
Best story about McDormand: early on, when she would get auditions for movie roles that specified the character had a full figure, she would show up with a pair of fake tits in a shopping bag.
5 - Chris Evans
Dude, that's fucking hilarious!
6 - Joan Rivers
I couldn't agree with you more, Aniston has no range. She is more worried about her hair not being perfect than transforming fully into her character. She has never had any kind of acting ability, she should of been a hair dresser instead. She is cute but that's all she has going for her and that is slowly fading.
7 - Alan Dale
Ouch. Well, I like her a bit more than you do, but I certainly don't miss her between movies. And I never understood the appeal of Friends at all. Thanks for that energetic comment.