Pig - 2021
Somewhere deep in the hills and forests of Oregon, off the beaten path, lives a solitary truffle hunter. Actually, in point of fact, the hunter himself is of a much more porcine nature. Still, this oinker keeps his master in tow - a begrizzled, full-bearded, long silver-haired specimen who is more yeti than anything resembling social "man." Onlookers to their rustic existence, we witness the man and pig traipsing together in search of their quarry, truffles which have become a regional culinary delight. After a few moment's the camera settles on the downcast man's face, and we see it is none other than the ever feral Nicolas Cage. Then, mere moments later, the film takes a sharp left turn. Thieves arriving in the night filch his beloved pig and run off before the dawn, leaving our protagonist in a bloody heap.
As the sun rises over the horizon the next morning and we glance at the visage of one Robin Feld (for that is this blank slate's name), our heart quickens a beat. For we know what is surely coming. In short, a violent quest. An odyssey of vengeance, as Nic Cage the Wild returns to “TAKE BACK WHAT IS MINE” (we can practically hear the 90’s movie trailer guy voice). One man. One mission. One…furry pig. Ready to take on an entire underworld of ruthless businessmen and crafty middlemen. We’ve seen this film before, and we couldn’t be happier to witness this tried-and-true formula once again.
So we watch and wait. But our expectation of visceral bloodletting and rising body counts does not come to pass. Why? Because this, good friends, is an example par excellence of the power of genre subversion. Pig taps into a frequency that we know all too well. The questing vengeful man who has lost a pet is John Wick. The loner unfit for polite company yet possessing a strong internal ethic is Phoenix in You Were Never Really There. The revenge thriller is a genre film rut which is well worn.
Yet this time around, first time director Michael Sarnoski brilliantly flips the whole thing on its head by casting Cage himself. When we glimpse his face, things get very meta. Each of us instantly downloads the dozens of films of Nic Cage into our craniums, like Neo learning Kung Fu. Soon, we’re all playing back the tape of the Cage Goes Crazy pictures, or the Overemoter himself. The Wild Eyed Nic and the Angry Driver, the Woo-inflected hysterical nut and Cosmatos' Mandy. It's all there, and this film's subtlety begins to disarm our defenses.
So, if Pig does not concern itself with any such mission, what then is it really about? How about a moving story of three men dealing with love and grief? The powerful emotions it engenders and the heavy toll it takes on those who have lost much. Pig has this in spades. It’s two most powerful sequences involve not gunplay but meals seated at a table. Both examining love and the interests people pursue in contradistinction to the counterfeit identities we all settle for in order to make ends meet. Robin’s lunch encounter with a former cook on his chef line is simply chilling in regard to the latter. “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about,” he says at one point. What a chilling indictment of counterfeit living, squelched passions, the nature of real vocation, and the forward engine of capitalistic progress.
Pig has room in its wide philosophical inquiry for all of these themes. But perhaps the final meal grants us the most powerful of all. That is the stunning truth that it takes far more courage to reach out to someone on a human level than to obliterate them completely. “Hate cannot drive out hate,” the good doctor once said. “Only love can do that.” In this picture, we bear witness to the amazing power of grief and the equally mesmeric transformation that the seeds of forgiveness can bring to fruition. To Sarnoski’s credit, this is no FULL evolution. It’s but a single step, an inching motion towards unthawing the decimated heart. A pig whose loss mirrored his very own beloved’s, and a human connection between wronged and the one wronging, which brought about the beginnings of something new.
To our brain’s collection of Nic Cages let us add one more. Witness Cage the measured, pained, grief-stricken philosopher. The man who’s lost far too much, but in beginning the journey of grabbing a few strands back gifts us with one of the better performances of his entire career.
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