What qualifies as a great performance? Decades of conditioning by movie critics, not to mention Oscar voters who insist on recognizing Meryl Streep each time she adopts a new accent, have led many moviegoers to think they must applaud when an actor is said to “disappear” into a part. Such performers are thought to be paragons of selflessness and subtlety, willing to set aside their own personalities for the sake of high art.
In truth, moviegoers have always taken pleasure in performers who remain blatantly and unapologetically themselves on the big screen — those who seem less interested in incarnating a character than simply summoning their own reserves of charisma, intelligence, and even eccentricity. During his long reign as America’s most widely admired actor, Marlon Brando became so flagrant in his tics, mannerisms, and improvised riffs that it was impossible for an audience to suspend disbelief and accept him as an actual character. In his brilliant late-career turn in the Mafia comedy The Freshman (1990), Brando managed to render the plot, and sometimes even the jokes themselves, irrelevant thanks to his torrent of self-referential mumbling and random bits of business — say, the long, drawn-out way he deposits sugar into Matthew Broderick’s cup of espresso. This is less performing than performance art.
For audiences to enjoy this sort of thing, however, an actor has to be willing to hover above the material: to kid it or act around it or simply ignore it. Such is the secret to the success of Samuel L. Jackson, whose signature rhetorical device, over-the-top screaming, arguably contributed immeasurably to the success of Quentin Tarantino’s early films. (Try to imagine anyone but Jackson saying, in Pulp Fiction, “Do they speak English in What?”) And it formed the basis for at least one entire movie, the regrettable (but not unentertaining!) 2006 fright film Snakes on a Plane.
Yet the undisputed master of molding movies to his persona is surely Nicolas Cage, who, long before becoming something of a punchline for his gleefully unrestrained performances in a series of increasingly odd, random, and ill-funded productions, seemed to delight in disrupting otherwise ordinary movies with his jittery, hyped up, always-on-edge performance style.
I remember the first time I became conscious that Cage was no longer putting his gifts at the service of mere characterization — if he ever was. In 1998, just three years after he gave an Oscar-winning performance in Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas, Cage headlined Brian De Palma’s Atlantic City-set morality tale Snake Eyes. Playing proudly corruptible detective Rick Santoro, Cage looks to have remembered and recycled every actor who ever played a small-time wheeler-dealer in a movie, placed them all in a blender, and come out with a rich, thick puree of smooth talk, hustle, and con. His performance is loud, wild-eyed, and delightfully vulgar: as garish as the Hawaiian shirt he wears and as hyperactive as director De Palma’s roving Steadicam. At the time, Cage’s uninhibited acting choices did not seem so strange. Those of us who had grown up with the actor — he had already made the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona (1987), David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996) — were more or less getting what we wanted: pure, unvarnished Cage.
But as H.L. Mencken said of what democracy delivers to the people, we who cheered on Cage’s scenery-chewing got what we deserved, and we got it good and hard. As his projects became more obviously questionable and less auteur-driven — for example, his appearance in the gooey holiday comedy The Family Man (2000) or the preposterous World War II romance Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) — Cage’s accumulated weirdness stood out more and more. I concede that there’s something deeply unfair in this analysis: Cage was the same unruly, unpredictable, unrealistic actor when he was appearing in respectable art house releases as when he was showing up in schlock on the order of Ghost Rider (2007) and the National Treasure series. Cage didn’t change as much as our tolerance for him did — a tolerance lowered, undoubtedly, due to the almost unfathomable increase in his output starting in the early 2010s, which coincided with, or resulted from, a period of financial difficulty.
Two new works take stock of Cage’s confounding cinematic legacy in an entertaining and often enlightening fashion. In the new comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage plays Nick Cage — a particularly at-loose-ends version of himself as he attempts to resuscitate his flagging career and diminished reputation.
Bypassed for a plum part by a top director, an amusing cameo by filmmaker David Gordon Green, who directed Cage in 2013’s Joe, condescended to by his fictional ex-wife, Olivia (Sharon Horgan), in therapy with his fictional teenage daughter Addy (Lily Mo Sheen), and indebted to the Sunset Tower Hotel to the tune of $600,000, Nick is so desperate for a little respect, not to mention a decent payday, that he accepts $1 million in exchange for a personal appearance at a birthday party given for a deep-pocketed fan in Spain, Javi (Pedro Pascal), who also wants Nick to help him begin his screenwriting career.
As a self-parody, the movie is rather pitiless, and credit to Cage for agreeing to go along with it: Nick is shown to be the sort of insufferable self-styled film buff who compares a script to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s cult classic crime picture House of Strangers (1949) and considers the 1920 German silent movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari essential viewing for his adolescent daughter. Meanwhile, Nick is plagued by a kind of phantom, or Id, called Nicky Cage, who resembles the actor as he looked in the mid-1990s and serves as a tangible reminder of how far Nick’s star has fallen. Perhaps the high point in the interaction between Nick and Nicky is when the two engage in a prolonged smooch on screen — the definitive representation of movie star narcissism.
Yet director and co-screenwriter Tom Gormican — he penned the script with Kevin Etten — isn’t about to make this movie a pity party: Like Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980) and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) before it, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent both sends up and lionizes the star at its center. Indeed, Gormican constructs a world in which Nick may be washed up by standard metrics but has achieved a sort of immortality anyway: Here’s a movie in which characters watch Con Air, freely invoke Guarding Tess (1994), and refer to Face/Off (1997) in almost religious terms. When the plot calls for Nick to summon his old action hero skills to assist CIA agent Vivan (Tiffany Haddish) in unraveling a kidnapping plot in which Javi appears to play a role, we know that Gormican is giving Nick Cage — and therefore Nicolas Cage — the thing he has been craving: the chance to save the day once more. For all of the film’s self-referential jokiness, Gormican isn’t interested in making a fool of Cage as much as restoring him to his glory days, and the action sequences, while laced with improbabilities, show that, in many ways, he’s still got the goods. Who knows — if Con Air 2 were made, it would probably be a huge hit.
Count film critic Keith Phipps as among those who buy into Cage’s “massive talent,” too. In his new book, Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career, out at the end of March 2022, Phipps traces the contours of Cage’s career with honesty and candor but also undisguised affection. “His name could summon up highs and lows of the sort few other actors could boast; nor could few other actors prompt so much discussion as to which were the highs and which the lows,” writes Phipps, who also sees in Cage’s filmography a prism through which to examine changes in Hollywood from the 1980s to the present. By Phipps’s reckoning, Cage has “appeared in virtually every sort of movie made over the last four decades, from sweet romantic comedies to assaultive action films, while at almost every point staying true to his artistic impulses, strange as they sometimes seemed.”
In fact, Cage’s artistic impulses were strange from the get-go. Born in Long Beach, California, in 1964 to August Coppola, the elder brother of Francis Ford Coppola, Cage (a surname he adopted in homage to the Marvel Comics character Luke Cage) benefited from the indulgence of his legendary uncle, who cast him in a number of early films, including The Cotton Club (1984), in which he played a gangster and on the set of which he engaged in all manner of bad behavior behind the scenes, including trashing his trailer. “I have to say, both my uncle and my father seemed amazingly patient with my shenanigans, so to speak, as an actor,” Cage said.
That patience extended to Coppola tolerating Cage’s on-screen choices, which, in the director’s comedy-drama Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), included the actor wearing false teeth and patterning his speech after the Claymation character Pokey, the orange horse on the children’s show Gumby, for his performance as Kathleen Turner’s husband. “The problem was that once Nicolas got the role, he wanted to prove that he wasn’t there as the result of nepotism,” Turner said. “And so everything Francis wanted him to do, he just went against — just to show he wasn’t under Francis’s wing.”
Things only got stranger from there. Norman Jewison, who directed Cage in Moonstruck, called the actor “the most tormented soul I had ever met.” Within a few years, he logged a pair of performances that remain notable for their excess: as a cockroach-ingesting vampire in Vampire’s Kiss (1988) and as a violent maniac with a soft spot for Elvis in Wild at Heart (1990).
Phipps finds “a surprising amount of gravitas” in the way Cage delivers the line “Put the bunny back in the box!” in Con Air, but at the same time, he can’t get around the basic reality that at some point, the actor began to accept a dizzying array of parts in projects of highly debatable merit — approximately the same state of affairs portrayed in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
What possessed Cage to play an angel romancing Meg Ryan in City of Angels (1998) or to adopt an Italian accent in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001)? Could it have been money? Cage, who by the late 1990s could demand paychecks of $20 million per picture, maintained a lifestyle defined, in part, by “buying a lot of stuff,” Phipps writes, and that included numerous properties, with as many as 15 homes, among them a private island in the Bahamas. “I think that having different environments is better than having one huge, you know, space that you reside in all the time,” the actor said, offering a quote to go along with the dictionary definition of “First World problems.” In a moment of almost comical hubris in 2000, Cage floated the notion of using a new stage name, “Miles Lovecraft,” for his darker films and using his own name — well, the one we know him by — for more mainstream films on the order of, presumably, his never-made entry in the Superman franchise with director Tim Burton.
To be sure, there are many actors who stay on the Hollywood treadmill seemingly to pay the bills — Robert De Niro comes to mind — and just as many who, after a period of great success, find themselves relegated to junky projects not worth their time or talent, such as Cage’s Face/Off co-star John Travolta. What, then, sets Cage apart? What justifies Phipps’s decision to write a book about him and Gormican’s choice to build a movie around him? Maybe the answer is no more complicated than this: We like Cage just as he is, and most of us probably have a sneaking suspicion, one certainly confirmed by his enthusiastic participation in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, that he’s in on the joke.
It’s impossible to imagine that an actor of such skill and perception could utter the line “Not the bees!” in the notorious horror film flop The Wicker Man (2006) without intending them to be quoted. (Phipps seems to agree that Cage knew what he was doing.)
So, Hollywood can go on honoring actors who become one with their parts — heck, the industry can even give Streep another Oscar or two — but there exist in this fair land of ours many moviegoers who simply want to see Nicolas Cage at the wheel of an out-of-control automobile, executing an unbelievable stunt, and giving a grandiloquent speech or two. Throughout The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Nick Cage boosts himself up during moments of doubt by repeating the refrain that he “never went anywhere” — a denial that a comeback is even necessary that functions as a candid admission of any movie star’s inherent insecurity. Yet Phipps’s warmly encyclopedic book decisively demonstrates that Cage really never did go anywhere, and the actor’s own massively entertaining new movie shows that we’d never want him to, either.
Peter Tonguette is a Washington Examiner contributing writer.
