Basking in the total Nick Cageness of Nick Cage
If you live in California, Nicolas Cage is a Prius. If you live in Alabama, Nicolas Cage is an F-150. If you live in Colorado, Nicolas Cage is a Subaru. Ubiquitous, omnipresent, universal don’t begin to describe his career. Simple descriptors, most adjectives, even words themselves, fail to cover the sheer, gargantuan, remark-ability of the man’s effect on our collective souls.
Since 1981’s The Best of Times, he’s appeared in 110 works, which is an average of over two works a year for 41 years. He’s been directed by Alan Parker, David Lynch, Joel Coen, Mike Figgis. He’s been in not one, not two, but three Jerry Bruckheimer movies. The number of Nicolas Cage memes on YouTube alone would suck up a weekend, if not a spring break, or even half a summer break. A thousand years from now, I’m sure historians will pack lecture halls in their Nicolas Cage classes. Hell, I could even see Nicolas Cage Studies as a legitimate university major.
So, expectations for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – in which Nicolas Cage plays both a contemporary, and a young Nicolas Cage, must deal with real-life Nicolas Cage problems like debt, divorce, decades of bad films, the judgment of nearly everyone he encounters – could not be higher. So, if not taken seriously – sort of like Nicolas Cage’s career – the film delivers steady laughs, crisp dialog, and so much Nicolas Cageness, that I’ll bet after watching it you’ll at least revisit the first half of Raising Arizona, or The Rock, or Leaving Las Vegas, or Valley Girl, or Color Out of Space, or whichever Nicolas Cage film you’re thinking of right now.
At this point the plot of the film is somewhat secondary. We could just watch Nick being Nick for two hours. But, alas, a film must be a film. This film begins with a scene from Con Air as the film’s very first shot. The camera pulls back to reveal canoodling teens Evan (Kristian Flores) and Maria (a very Bruckheimeresque Katrin Vankova) fawning over honorably discharged Army Ranger sergeant and combat veteran Cameron Poe being both a daddy and such a man! Suddenly this movie moment is shattered by thugs breaking in, kidnaping Maria, and formally kicking things off.
Meanwhile, we’re introduced to Nick, or reintroduced, or introduced to the real-life Nick playing the character of the real-life Nick. Character and biography comingle nicely. Nick is deeply in debt, deeply out of public favor, and in deep trouble of becoming estranged from his daughter, Addy played to a nicely-tuned teenaged perfection by Lily Mo Sheen. Nick’s ex-wife Olivia (the tragically underexposed and savagely funny Sharon Horgan) tries to salvage some kind of post-family rapprochement.
Enter agent Richard Fink (the solid, if predictable Neil Patrick Harris), who relays an $1M offer from uber-rich and probably shady Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal) to Nick Cage it up at Javi’s Majorca compound.
The two plot strands eventually interweave, with the full complement of drug binges, car chases, gun fights, and budding bromance. The film culminates with a scene – featuring Demi Moore as movie actress Olivia and Anna McDonald as movie actress Addy – from a film made from a script of the Majorca weekend. This sounds like a recipe for a confusing disaster, but directer Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script keeps things very light and moving briskly. One gem: early on, in a family therapy session, Addy expresses frustration at her dad’s constant badgering to get her to watch old Hollywood films, specifically those of Humphrey Bogart. “I thought he was a porn star” she says, straight-faced.
The film’s greatest accomplishment is to stuff many layers of meta-commentary into a simple buddy film, and through light entertainment to remind us of the make-up of the cultural landscape that we take for granted, one peopled with folks who every once in a while have an arc so epically broad as to themselves be part of that landscape. I’m looking at you Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Leo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Robert Downy Jr, and of course, Will Smith.
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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent opens today at Bay Area theaters.
