darvocet21
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 31, 2021
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I love Nicolas Cage. His vulnerability & work ethic. His refusal to do a superhero movie. His respect for audiences. His devotion to craft, the uncanny ability to become, for a couple of hours screen time, another person.
Or people, as in Adaptation, where Cage plays the film's real-life screenwriter & his (fictional?) doofus twin brother, whose shameless lack of self-awareness is a great embarrassment to the neurotic writer of cult movies whose prestige is rising as his self-esteem implodes in self-recrimination at not being able to tell the woman he loves how he really feels because she may not feel the same way... meanwhile everything his doofus brother touches turns to gold.
It's one of the bravest meditations on freedom ever made by a Hollywood studio and hard to imagine anyone pulling it off besides Cage.
His new movie's odd subject matter -- former chef & restauranteur trades the fast life for a partnership with a truffle-sniffing pig in the damp wild of the Pacific Northwest, reducing his human contacts to just one, a buyer of his gourmet shrooms -- shows him almost at peace and can't possibly last. The character seems written for him, because he's the only icon of alienation we have left. Certainly the only one able to deliver the line "I don't fuck my pig" with the earnest deadpan required. In surreal times seriousness becomes a form of rebellion.
Cage knows the world is a nasty place where greed, stupidity & lies prevail. Yet his characters struggle with the worst aspects in themselves, unable to find real peace, deeply in need of a miracle.
Who even comes close? Perhaps Al Pacino. Certainly Jon Turturro when it comes to grappling onscreen with the kind of seething anger which is the real underbelly of life in America (if you've never watched "Five Corners" you should). John Goodman & George Clooney for their impeccable (dark) comic timing, as well as Steve Buscemi. Maybe equal in talent was the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, truly one of us...may his soul find rest... And for about a decade the Mickey Rourke of movies like Diner and Barfly
On the female side I love Jennifer Jason Leigh. For her beauty & intelligence and the effortless way she inhabits a role; going back to Fast Times at Ridgemont High she was the only character in that movie who didn't seem like they were playing a part. A true genius who for the idiocy of Hollywood has probably been in about 1/3 of the movies and one-fifth of the brilliant possible roles that she should have been in.
The following is an excerpt from Variety (link to full review below).
Nicolas Cage isn’t just an actor; he’s a state of mind. Having transcended meme status with evocative performances in director-driven genre fare like “Mandy” and “Color Out of Space,” the Oscar winner delivers his best performance in years as a chef-turned-recluse who briefly reenters society in writer-director Michael Sarnoski’s “Pig.” His return isn’t a happy one, however: Robin (Cage) only leaves the Oregonian wilderness after his beloved truffle pig is violently taken from him. Less revenge thriller than intimate character study, “Pig” is above all else a reminder that Cage is among the most gifted, fearless actors working today.
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