Pig is a masterpiece

“Go on.”

“When the pig gets kidnapped, he pursues it through the Portland underworld and has a series of dangerous encounters.”

“Oh?”

“There’s an illegal boxing ring and a truffle-dealing gangster. But our guy wins in the end by cooking a really fancy meal.”

“So … Fight Club meets Babette’s Feast?

“More like Taken with a side of bacon.”

“Sold!”

However it unfolded, Pig’s greenlighting is the type of miracle that rarely occurs in Hollywood these days. A film of modest ambitions that is unlikely to make anyone a fortune, Sarnoski’s picture is best described with a series of startled affirmatives. Yes, it stars Nicolas Cage as an angry hermit with a truffle-sniffing swine. Yes, it is every bit as unusual as the rumors suggest. Yes, it is, without question, one of the finest movies of the year.

Pig begins in a remote Oregon forest, where Cage’s Robin Feld lives in mourning after the death of his wife. With only a foraging hog for company, Robin digs up his prizes and sells them to Amir (an excellent Alex Wolff), who sources rare ingredients for high-end Portland restaurants. The truffle trade is, as it turns out, something of a family business for Robin’s young associate. When thieves purloin our hero’s pig, the trail leads eventually to Amir’s father, Darius (Adam Arkin), a fellow supplier whose own wife lies in a coma as the result of a failed suicide attempt.

Though staged with palpable tension, Pig is, at its essence, a film about the twin virtues of self-denial and sincerity. Tracking his beloved pet to a subterranean boxing club, a wrathful Robin secures his next clue not by vanquishing an opponent but by offering himself as a sacrifice. (In short, he proves to the club’s owner that he is willing to take a beating.) The same tentative humility is present in Robin’s complicated relationship with Amir. Despite heaping abuse on the young man in the film’s early going, Cage’s character comes to recognize that the only way to secure his friend’s assistance is to bare his soul. The slowly blossoming relationship that results from this vulnerability is one of the cornerstones of a movie that is never less than emotionally compelling.

Among Pig’s most memorable scenes are those in which Robin’s newfound earnestness serves as a kind of ammunition, not only furthering his quest but changing hearts and minds in the process. In one of these encounters, between Robin and a former assistant from whom he requires information, the older man gently reproaches his protege for lacing a menu with pretentious critic bait (e.g., “scallops bathed in the smoke from Douglas fir cones”). In another, set in the kitchen of the intimidating Darius, Robin discovers an adversary so hardened by life that only a healing gesture can reach him. What these episodes have in common is their total renunciation of the violence that Robin is so obviously capable of accepting and meting out. Having established himself as a bruiser in the film’s first act, Robin commits himself thereafter to honesty, openness, and the power of a well-cooked dinner.

It is in the last of these abstractions that Pig grounds what is arguably its most important sequence. Face to face with Darius at the picture’s climax, Robin prepares a meal that is meant to evoke his antagonist’s happier past, before the years of his wife’s long affliction. In addition to being beautifully scored and photographed, the resulting scene possesses a depth of feeling that has nearly vanished from American cinema. Indeed, Pig’s effectiveness derives from exactly this emotional seriousness. Sarnoski’s plot may be vaguely ridiculous, but he approaches his material without the least shred of irony.

As for the film’s aging star, it is almost certainly the case that Cage’s performance here is his best work since anchoring 2002’s Adaptation a shocking 62 movies ago. To be sure, the veteran screen presence says “yes” to far too many projects. Yet he remains, in the right director’s hands, a leading man of considerable sensitivity and skill. Entering the theater, I knew that Cage was earning plaudits for his depiction of a bereaved recluse determined to reclaim his lost property. Now, I find myself wondering if the reviews are actually underselling the rawness and magnetism of his portrayal.

Does every generation get the pig movie it deserves, to reappropriate the old cliche? Babe, a product of the untroubled 1990s, was lighter than air and allayed its animal-harm narrative with the music of Saint-Saens and an ensemble of singing mice. Pig, the output of our heavier time, offers no such mitigation but is nevertheless a hopeful film after its own fashion. Coming to the end of his journey, Robin sits down at last to an audio recording left by his wife but put aside while the worst of his grief endured. His search, in other words, has carried him to the other side of something. Mightn’t that be heaven he’s glancing toward as the screen goes black?

Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.