FILM
an Oscar for Leaving Las
Ve ga s. We get lots of
namechecks of Con
Air, The Rock and
Gone in 60 Seconds
but nothing about
his Elvis impression
in Wild at Heart, his
eating of a plump,
wriggling cockroach in
Vampire’s Kiss, or his theft of
some nappies in Raising
Arizona. Those are the films
on which Cage’s legend really
rests. It’s a bit like someone
posing as a Shakespeare
scholar turning out to have
once read Romeo and Juliet.
I suspect the film-makers
got scared about not reaching
enough people, and so
plumped for the action movies,
even though there’s little in
them that is distinctly Cage: his
gonzo intensity showed up like
a DVD extra amid the fireballs.
Once he’s done his smoky stare
and dulcet intro —“Nic Cage,”
he says, bringing fist and palm
together in front of his face,
like a cross between a movie
star and a mason — there’s very
little Cage can do that evokes
those films. Gormican’s film is
like a watered-down Being John
Malkovich, with hurr-hurr
laughs in place of surrealism,
and a stubbornly tedious
subplot involving a drug
cartel, the kidnapping of a
presidential candidate’s
daughter (Katrin Vankova),
and some CIA agents, Vivian
(Tiffany Haddish) and Martin
(Ike Barinholtz), which soon
leaves the film’s meta-
Hollywood satire far behind.
For much of its running time
you could simply be watching
one of those straight-to-video
Nicolas Cage bestrode the late
Eighties like a Method-acting
Elvis. “I’ve got the hair! I’ve
got the teeth! I’ve got the
eyes,” he declared in Francis
Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got
Married, turning a jock’s brag
into an act of almost divine
self-assertion: I quiff,
therefore I am. In film after
film — Raising Arizona,
Moonstruck, Vampire’s Kiss,
Wild at Heart — he brought a
gonzo intensity to the simple
act of drinking a milkshake
that left you thinking: “Is this
guy for real?”
It wasn’t as simple as
overacting, but nor was it
quite acting, as commonly
understood. It was like an
actor’s version of air guitar:
gorgeously untrammelled
bouts of scene-stealing energy
that Cage seemed only half
in control of (was he in on the
joke or not?), but which
answered a call
older than acting
itself — to commit,
to register, to
connect with an
audience or else
be lost for ever
amid the grey,
dusty shelves
of the great
unwatched. He
grabbed us with
his ego, but
we connected with his panic.
So there’s perhaps less
cleverness to the set-up of Tom
Gormican’s The Unbearable
Weight of Massive Talent
than at first appears. In the
film, Nicolas Cage — or rather
“Nick Cage”— plays himself,
or the version of himself we
imagine him to be in recent
years; a celebrity wasting
away in full public view,
both ignored and somehow
ubiquitous. “You seem to be
working all the time,” his
therapist Cheryl ( Joanna
Bobin) says, and yet he has
to beg for a part from the
director David Gordon Green
in the street in the hope of a
comeback. “Not that we went
anywhere,” he mutters. At
home he is a sad-sack dad,
boring his wife (Sharon
Horgan) and 16-year-old
daughter, Addy (Lily Mo
Sheen), with memories of
greatness past. “You’re a
movie star! And don’t you
forget it!” screams a de-aged
Cage from his Wild at Heart
days, who pops up every now
and again like a cross between
Jiminy Cricket and Norma
Desmond. It makes sense: that
film, by David Lynch, was the
moment Cage’s acting turned
into its own kitschy special
effect, coming right at ya from
the screen.
All this cuts somewhat
close to home, but not half as
sharply as Cage did playing a
Hollywood loser in Charlie
Kaufman’s Adaptation. You
can’t out-meta Nic Cage. He’s
already the most meta kid on
the block. Part of the
genius of Cage’s
braggadocio
is that you
could always
sense the
flop-sweat
behind
it — his
Cage
against the
machine
The Hollywood maverick is playing
himself — again. It’s meta but is it good?
THE
CRITICS
TOM
SHONE
The eyes
have it
Nicolas Cage
in his new
film. Left: in
Peggy Sue
Got Married
Right: Maya
Vanderbeque
and Günter
Duret in
Playground
wildness always had a
touch of the karaoke
bar — so the film’s
peek behind the
curtain is less
revealing than it
seems.
After losing out on
the role with Green,
Nick accepts a million-dollar
offer to fly to Spain and
appear at a birthday
celebration for a billionaire
superfan, Javi Gutierrez
(Pedro Pascal), whose
appreciation of Cage’s work
seems to hinge mostly on the
five-year period after he won
The Unbearable Weight
of Massive Talent
Tom Gormican, 15, 107min
HHH
Playground
Laura Wandel, 15, 72min
HHHH
14 24 April 2022