Does Pig want to be a movie starring Nicolas Cage, or a NICOLAS CAGE movie?
The distinction is harder to make than you might think. Even in his best performances—especially in his best performances—Cage turns the material off-kilter, reading a line the way no one else would, for instance, or staring a bit more intensely at a costar than is probably required. Yet clearly there are those Cage movies where his unique choices overwhelm the material—even, as in The Wicker Man, when the material is marching to the beat of its own deranged drummer.
Pig, for the most part, functions as a very good movie starring the really great actor Nicolas Cage. He plays Rob, a burly, bearded recluse living in the forest outside of Portland, searching for truffles with his beloved pet pig and selling them to the city’s trendiest restaurants via a brash young broker named Amir (Alex Wolff). One night, Rob’s cabin is violently invaded and his pig is stolen. Caked in blood from the attack, he immediately sets out the next morning, with Amir’s help, to search for his animal.
As many have pointed out, the John Wick potential is there (especially as we get hints about Rob’s complicated past). With his wild hair and open wounds, Rob certainly looks like a man capable of retaliatory violence. At the same time, he’s quiet and gentle. One crucial aspect of Cage’s performance is the way he moves—deliberately but slowly, as if he doesn’t want to disturb anyone with his presence. When he speaks, which is reluctantly, it’s with a somber air of sagacity. “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about,” he offers, delivering one of the film’s many tender, come-to-Cage moments.
And yet, Pig also gives us the Cage of Mom and Dad, if not The Wicker Man. Many of the scenes begin with him walking into a room looking like Santa in the off season, after surviving a nasty knife fight with his elves. The muted physicality is also played for laughs, as when Rob stiffly turns his head toward the man who asks, “I’m sorry, do you need medical attention?” He also gets a monologue about the apocalyptic earthquake that is destined to wipe out Portland. When the person listening mentions Seattle, he delivers a very Cage-y response: “F*** Seattle.”
Surely first-time feature director Michael Sarnoski cast Cage for these qualities. Certainly he was aware that given Cage’s reputation, every moment of his movie would have the potential to send audiences hooting. So is it really the audience’s fault, then, if we laugh when Rob, desperately stealing a bike while in search of his pig, barks at the owner to scare them away? Maybe we’re supposed to?
Pig is best when it doesn’t leave us in that gray area, but commits—alongside Cage—to its seriousness. This is, in many ways, a deeply thoughtful film—about loneliness, grief, anger, and finding something to truly care about. And Cage gives a performance that embodies all of those things. Pig comes to a climax involving a meal that I won’t spoil, except to say that it turns John Wick on its head, as well as whatever notions of “crazy Cage” we might have still held up until that point. This is a Nicolas Cage movie, in the end.
