Nicholas Cage

  • Birdy (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) I did not expect to be quite so sucked into Birdy, because any concise description of the film is liable to be misleading. While it is a drama about two wounded Vietnam veterans trying to overcome their trauma, don’t go into the film expecting a traditional structure where two young men are drafted, sent to Vietnam, and then get back. Birdy spends almost no time in Vietnam at all, instead focusing on the childhood of the two main characters and how that influences their attempt at recovery after their tour of duty. A young (and buff) Nicholas Cage stars as a soldier with head trauma, while Matthew Modine has a more challenging role as an eccentric bird-lover who ends up in a psychiatric ward in a mute state, seemingly imitating a bird. The script flashes back all over the place as one man tries to get the other to snap out of his condition before Army bureaucracy locks him up forever. Two thirds of the film are spent in 1960s working-class Philadelphia, as the two teenagers become friends and support each other through formative experiences. There’s a fair bit of humour and eccentricity here, helping tie up the grimmer post-war framing device. Even the very last shot of the film is a joke playing on overly glum expectations. Allan Parker’s direction keeps things interesting even through a full two hours and some uncomfortable material about obsession and madness, making Birdy still feel quite unlike most other comparable films.

  • Pig (2021)

    Pig (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) On a conceptual level, there’s something that looks like a heavy parodic intent to Pig’s overarching plot: Here we have Nicholas Cage going on a rampage after his truffle-sniffing pig is stolen, straight into the underworld of the Portland restaurant scene — and all for naught at the end. It sounds like a dark parody of John Wick’s dog-avenging quest, with a final subversion at the end. But there’s nothing funny about Pig on a moment-to-moment basis: Directed with melancholic sadness by Michael Sarnoski, the potentially silly premise becomes a character study of grief wrapped in loose genre clothing. Executed with some precision, it’s undoubtedly a slick film from someone who knows what he’s doing. Whether it works will depend on your tolerance for such a thing: in Cage’s filmography, this is closer to Joe than Mandy, even if Cage does get to go from a finely dramatic performance to a bit of a late-film freakout. The slow, glum pacing frequently runs at odds with the plot’s genre demands — and the intentional disappointment of the conclusion will deflate whatever interest the film will have to audiences not quite expecting Cage to go as dramatic as usual in a deliberately misleading film. At least Pig remains a welcome reminder that Cage can still be an unpredictable and dependable actor — unlike many of his generation struggling for relevance, he’s still going from one wildly different thing to another, and still giving it all he’s got.