Watched: 09/04/2022
Format: Amazon? Jamie put it on
Viewing: First
Decade: 2020's
I am a fan of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal on HBOmax, a show that is absolutely about Inception levels of reality. It's a reality show, pushing the envelope of what is real, what is fiction, what is simply dicking around with people who expect reality to conform to certain principles and people who have made up their own reality tossed into the mix and given lead roles.
I feel like that was good training for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), a film - a bit like Being John Malkovich - that asks an actor of particular talent and quirkiness to engage with their own persona and perform as themselves as a central character in a movie in which everyone else is fictional, and the version of themselves is only loosely based on reality.
For those of us old enough to have grown up on Vampire's Kiss, Leaving Las Vegas, Moonstruck, as well as Raising Arizona and Honeymoon in Vegas, Cage's late 90's turn to action-hero came as a bit of a surprise. He was the hero of the indie film world who was out there walking tightropes, making films he was in memorable and better. His Sailor in Lynch's Wild at Heart (paired with Dern's Lula) is still a favorite character of mine in anything.
The film is a fascinating fractal of a kaleidoscope of Cage - tracking his career in beats through the movie, which starts as a small, character-driven quirky indie feature and ends as a huge Hollywood-style actioner with an operatic happy ending in slow-mo, starring Cage as himself, of course.
In the purest sense, it's absolutely a love letter to Cage, an actor whose post Leaving Las Vegas career I've not stuck with (Con-Air delivered my very first migraine, through I didn't know that's what it was at the time). But one does not make it through a year of one's life and not see a Nic Cage movie.
Structure aside, Cage is here to remind you - he's one of the most talented actors of his generation, and when he's not cashing a check, there's no one else like him on screen. If you need an actor who can convey every range of human experience and emotion without a word, Cage is your guy.
And I do wonder how he viewed the script, which couldn't have been written about anyone else and landed the same way, which includes whole scenes with Cage fighting with his younger, punk rock version of himself - something the younger kids won't get, but for those of us who recognize this version of Cage, it's a whole thing.
Of course, the movie co-stars Pedro Pascal as an olive importer/ exporter who may actually be a criminal mastermind - but who is using his money to bring his favorite movie star, Nic Cage, to his villa in Majorca. And, as it's turning out, Pascal's success in the US is not a fluke. At the heart of the film is the unlikely friendship between Pascal and Cage as Pascal's Javi doesn't just understand Nic's filmography, there's a real kinship there.
Meanwhile, Cage has to navigate his broken relationship with his teen daughter (I don't know if he even has a teen daughter) and ex-wife (he has several).
I'm underselling how genuinely hilarious the film is, but it is genuinely the funniest movie I've seen this year. I don't *think* you have to have been tracking Cage for decades to enjoy it - I've mostly not been. But there's certainly layers upon layers if you know much about the guy. And it's absolutely a treat to see Pascal and Cage making all of this look so easy.
