I’ll get this out of the way just to start because I don’t know how much of this review I’ll spend actually talking about Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: Plenty of people who go to see this just for a fun night out at the movies will enjoy themselves. If modern studio comedy is your bag, and it is for a whole lot of folks, you’ll get your money’s worth: At the surface, it’s an amiable enough bromance between a broke and fading movie star named Nick Cage (Nicolas Cage) and a possible arms dealer (Pedro Pascal) with an unimaginable amount of money, who hires said movie star to make an appearance at his birthday party (and to, you know, read his screenplay, but kudos for him for having the cash upfront first instead of just ambushing him with a question at a Q&A at a local festival). Meanwhile the C.I.A., in the form of two operatives played by Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barenholtz, want Cage to do their dirty work for them and spy on his newfound bro so that they can finally capture him and rescue the Catalonian politician’s daughter that his organization has kidnapped. It’s full of jaunty comedy music (you know what I mean, the bah-bum shit that sounds like someone lobotomized Danny Elfman and forced him to compose muzak for government buildings), Paddington 2 jokes, flat cinematography in beautiful locales, and a copious amount of substance abuse, some of which makes Cage rage and some of which makes Cage sad enough to consider turning the page on his lengthy career: he’s accumulated nearly forty years worth of credits (in real life!), and as the rewards dry up, it seems like it might be quitting time.
For a movie that is obsessed enough with Nic Cage that it would probably not exist in any form whatsoever without his involvement, Massive Talent only really is concerned with a tenth of that time, a three-or-four year period where Cage starred in a series of formative action classics which continue to shape the unconscious public perception of his career. The Rock, Face/Off, Con Air — even Guarding Tess, which has a surprising amount of play here in this picture — these are the movies in his extensive oeuvre that we’ve chosen to build our monuments to, which makes a whole lot of sense when put into perspective beyond the fact that they’re all pretty damn good movies. The average person who logs on to something like r/OneTrueGod, a subreddit devoted entirely to Cage’s status as a meme king amongst millennials, probably grew up watching these movies (though, interestingly enough, National Treasure, which I’d argue is just important in helping to maintain the Cage meme, is barely referenced) and remember how they hit the pleasure center of their adolescent brains, flooding them with intoxicating dopamine, as well as just how odd he looked, compared to the rest of the folks on screen. He’s always been an intriguing figure physically when contrasted with Hollywood’s exacting standards, often paired with more traditionally handsome (and/or masculine) co-stars antagonists. In short, he’s relatable in appearance: He’s not the boy next door, but he is an everyman, someone you might see hanging around town and be curious about, a presence floating around every bar and diner with a story to tell about why he’s slamming two fingers of Wild Turkey, occasionally holding the ice-filled chilled glass against the bruised knuckles of his right hand, and laughing hysterically at a joke no one’s told and that no one can guess the answer to.
Yet there’s a paucity of imagination that feels unfair to Cage here: Those are three (or four) movies out of a career that rivals Takashi Miike’s output in frequency-of-release, and as the fictional Cage alludes to here, he simply likes to work. Sure, his tax and debt issues (another brief subplot, lightly glossed over in fictionalized terms as excessive spending after his divorce) have played a role in him taking parts that might be beneath his station, but I believe his justification as offered: He does a job, and why should he be allowed to take extended breaks, unlike every other person who works a steady nine-to-five? As I’ve alluded to before, Cage is always in search of truth in his performances, some nugget of honesty or interest that attracts him to a role even beyond the financial motivation (one could see why trying to grapple with this meme could appeal to him, offering some measure of demonstrating The Man Behind The Image) and he’s accumulated the career credentials to be able to pursue those interests beyond the control of your average direct-to-video helmer or set of producers. Do I believe for a single second that the brain trust behind something like Arsenal, a DTV feature starring Vinnie Chase that actually feels like a jokey in-universe Entourage gag that broke through the surly bonds of reality and appeared in ours, had the foresight to include a War of the Gargantuas reference in a teary letter that a blood-splattered and prosthetic-nose wearing Cage reads to his brother after murdering him? Or is it more likely that Cage saw a chance to incorporate a little bit of himself into a role and make something memorable out of a generic set of low-fi bad guy cliches? I’d suggest the latter, based on what I’ve seen from him over the length and breadth career.
But here’s a list of movies that are barely referenced or completely omitted from Massive Talent: Birdy, Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, Bringing Out the Dead, Leaving Las Vegas (a role for which he won Best Actor at the Oscars, yet is somehow listed behind a BAFTA and a Golden Globe on the Wikipedia page dedicated to his filmography), Vampire’s Kiss, Wild at Heart (beyond a t-shirt that a chimera of a younger and hideously digitally de-aged Cage wears when he occasionally appears to berate his older self into being NICOLAS FUCKIN’ CAGE, MAN), Knowing, Lord of War, Snake Eyes, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Adaptation, Windtalkers, Matchstick Men, Valley Girl, 8MM, and Peggy Sue Got Married (though perhaps avoidable if one wants to talk around Cage’s last name actually being “Coppola”), not to mention a whole host of memorable performances in smaller recent films like Mom and Dad, Color Out of Space and, of course, Mandy, which at least is name-checked here, because regardless of the reality of that deeply sad film, it looks pretty fuckin’ badass, dude. We can make fun of the term “nouveau shamanic,” which Cage coined as a way to describe his style of performance, as much as we want (and you better bet your ass that Massive Talent does so whenever it can), but the truth is that Cage is and has been more willing to use screen acting as a form of genuine and raw emotional expression than most of his contemporaries, though he’s often ill-served in the hands of directors who truly just do not know how to use him, a splash of vivid color on their palettes that doesn’t seem to properly fit in their dreary canvases. Hence the praise for an albeit-truly-spectacular yet subtle performance in something like Pig: It conforms to our expectations for capital-G capital-A Good Acting rather than challenging them. Cage was lucky enough to win his Oscar in the last period before our memories of televised images of the famous hadn’t totally colonized the Best Actor category, and no matter how good his work is, it will never be able to achieve the same sort of unanimous recognition that a quickly-forgotten impression will at the moment of its release.
This is all to say that Cage never really needed a movie like Massive Talent in the same way that someone like Jean-Claude Van Damme needed Mabrouk El Mechri’s JCVD, which, for my money, remains one of the best metatextual examinations of an actor’s career and public persona that wasn’t directed or written by the star themselves. It feels like that film was on Gormican’s mind, given how much they share in common plot-wise: A fading star is trapped, by circumstance, in a criminal environment, haunted by their failures as a father and a self-righteous advocate for their own career (Cage’s “nouveau shamanic” has its own echo in Van Damme’s “Je suis Aware”), who is forced to live up to or defy the expectations given to them by the culture at large. It’s telling that JCVD is an ironic drama, one that strips Van Damme of all of his major cinematic attributes beyond an echo of his real-life character, which, as the film exploits, is suspect at best, but one that makes him, a widely-perceived asshole, into a person deserving of empathy and not simply of our pity. Van Damme was at a similar yet very different phase of his career, having fully bottomed out in terms of readily available work outside of video, and Cage has never quite had that same problem: he hasn’t been wheeled out for an Expendables installment, and he still makes appearances in major films, animated or otherwise, at a frequent clip. If anything, Massive Talent has more in common with Jean-Claude Van Johnson, the short-lived Amazon series that Van Damme starred in, which never quite took off or achieved cult status in the same way that JCVD did precisely because it was a joke, a portrayal of the meme of Van Damme that had taken root in the aftermath of Doritos commercials and other frivolities: he does splits and shit, and remember that time he danced like a goofball in Kickboxer? It’s the repackaged version of a weird and memorable organic moment, processed and packaged for easy consumption.
Again, Massive Talent will probably make folks laugh in the same way that people laugh when they see a cutaway gag in Family Guy that offers some manner of ironic twist on a pop-culture memory (which I say without judgment, given that I often do!), but it eludes any consideration as to why Cage is such a memorable actor, or why he’s become such a meme after years of getting trashed left and right for the quality of his star vehicles and the exaggerated nature of his performances. If I had to posit a reason for the meme, beyond Cage’s face, which now adorns reversible pillows one can buy on Amazon and give as a gag gift at their office Christmas party (and, of course, one of which makes an appearance here), it’s that he delivered astonishingly memorable and earnest work, unrestrained by the boundaries of good taste, in periods where cinema prided itself on its comparative gravity and “realism” despite its inherent artifice. One of the best things about Cage was that he seemed baffled by the meme and, despite the occasional moment of self-referential goofballery (see Between Worlds, wherein in the midst of a marathon fuck sesh, he reads from a book of poetry authored by… Nicolas Cage), refused to acknowledge it within his work.
But now the meme has been acknowledged at the source, and though the faithful may be happy at receiving some recognition, it feels like we’re all poorer for it: It’s like fashion, where once a style is able to achieve cultural saturation, it becomes passé, and those on the bleeding edge move forward in search of new lands to conquer in their quest for perpetual innovation. To reference a now-ancient meme: In a way, we (and you and I) have lost the game, just by being cognizant of its existence.