#HIGHBROW MOVIE MOVIE#

For now, he seems mostly settled in the world of strange indies, though he has contributed voice work to tentpoles such as The Croods and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

#HIGHBROW MOVIE MOVIE#

One wonders whether there’s space for the Nicolas Cages of the future to give the kind of weird and wild performances he did-and whether he’ll ever pop back up in a movie with a bigger budget. Plenty of exciting young actors are emerging in contemporary Hollywood, but many of them are thrust into franchise films in which the brand functions as the real star, squelching individual artistry. Movie stardom feels much more hermetic now than it did when he was starting out. Read: The only movie watchlist you’ll need this summer Across his body of work, including similar hits, such as Face/Off, Con Air, and Ghost Rider, the thrill of a Cage performance comes from his willingness to challenge the traditional stoicism of the A-list action star. Cage’s first major-league action blockbuster, The Rock, derived its joyousness in part from what an unpredictable choice he was as a marquee idol. Still, he has some insight about the current state of big-budget filmmaking.

The actor’s financial struggles have been widely reported on, and surely motivated the forgettable paycheck work he’s been taking for the past decade. I don’t know if I’d want to go and make another Disney movie. “I do feel that I’ve gone into my own wilderness and that I’ve left the small town that is Hollywood,” Cage said.

box office since 2007’s National Treasure: Book of Secrets. He too has become something of a recluse, and hasn’t been in a live-action movie that made more than $100 million at the U.S. In an interview with Variety, Cage acknowledged the real-life parallels with his character. He was once a celebrated chef in Portland, though what motivated his now-reclusive existence is unclear. It’s some of his best, most nuanced work in years.Ĭage plays Rob, a hermit in the Oregon woods who quietly hunts for mushrooms with his trusty pig, named Pig. In Pig, Cage is the mournful center of a clever story about how commercialism rots the purity of artistic expression. Pig’s promotion leans into his current reputation as an actor unafraid to scream his lines and somehow emerge with his dignity (mostly) intact-and, in doing so, undersells his actual performance. But in the past 10 years, he has retreated from the mainstream and clogged his filmography with phoned-in cameos in blandly titled direct-to-video action movies. From his electrifying early appearances in Moonstruck and Raising Arizona to his eventual branding as a family-friendly movie star in Disney franchises such as National Treasure, he’s always been a magnetic screen presence capable of the most distinct and surprising choices. In this latest work, he’s a shambling, shaggy-haired farmer whose truffle pig is abducted the trailer makes him out to be some Old MacDonald John Wick, a hirsute avatar of vengeance bursting in on the criminal underworld and grumbling, “Where’s my pig?”Ĭage’s prodigious talent as an actor has never been in doubt. He’s developed from promising young talent to Oscar winner to action star to, well, living meme. On the basis of its advertising, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the indie film Pig is nothing more than the latest over-the-top entry in Nicolas Cage’s bewildering Hollywood career.

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