Jennifer Aniston fails to ignite the spark of Friends with Vince Vaughn in The Break Up. Photo / Supplied

Jennifer Aniston fails to ignite the spark of Friends with Vince Vaughn in The Break Up. Photo / Supplied

Jennifer Aniston stars as Elinor Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility ... no, of course she doesn't. Aniston doesn't do period drama. She is a defiantly modern, all-American actress; a tabloid favourite; one of the faces for L'Oreal and ... wait for it ... the woman who lost Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie.

And it doesn't matter one jot how much worthy United Nations work Jolie does, most of us are still stubbornly Team Aniston. Why? Because she's so ordinary, that's why.

So very ordinary and accessible with her engaging, genial comments like, "I couldn't have found a better man than Brad. He still opens doors for me and brings me flowers. He's the sweetest goofball on the planet".

Ouch. That has to hurt now. The sleek, perma-tanned 40-year-old from Sherman Oaks, California, started out so deliciously perky, all glossy hair and clean teeth, as Rachel in the defiantly upbeat sitcom Friends, but Aniston's face appears to become progressively more downcast in every film she appears in.

She's morphing into a sort of female Buster Keaton. Her smile is growing fainter and her film choices - or the parts she is being offered - are getting steadily shoddier.

The Independent's film critic, Anthony Quinn, described her latest one-star film, the unfortunately titled Love Happens, where Aniston plays an archery champion-turned-florist, as a "cry-baby romantic drama" in which "Aniston just about passes muster".

The Times went further, saying, "The formula they've come up with is to remove all the comedy, which is a bold choice." Previous Aniston films have been described as follows: "From the start it misfires on all cylinders" (The Observer on Rumour Has It); "There is something wildly odd about a film that measures human happiness with the whims of a dog (The Times on Marley & Me); and "a heavy-handed and charmless psychological thriller" (The Guardian on Derailed).

Aniston began her movie career relatively late (let's not count the abysmal 1992 horror Leprechaun) at the age of 27 in 1996, with Edward Burns' winning She's the One and Tiffanie DeBartolo's less winning Dream for an Insomniac.

She now has more than 20 films under her belt, mostly in a leading role and mostly as the droll, unlucky-in-love romantic - see He's Just Not That into You, Picture Perfect and The Object of My Affection for evidence.

Romantic comedies may be cynical and quite often facile, lacking depth, subtlety and, well, imagination, but Aniston never lets anybody down. In fact, now that Meg Ryan appears to have imploded, Aniston is probably - and this is a tad bold - the most gifted American comic actress of her generation.