Delayed Reaction: Pig

Premise: A man goes looking for his stolen truffle pig.

 

I appreciate the movies like Pig every Oscar season. Each year, there are a few movies that people want to will into Oscar consideration. Nothing about the movie says that it would ever be noticed by the Academy overall, but these supporters try anyway. And, in their defense, it does work on occasion. Screenplay probably most often. The vast majority are like Pig though. While fans beg for it to get Nic Cage an Oscar nomination, really what they are begging for is that movies like Pig even enter the discussion. What’s fun about these movies is that people really drill down to the single best thing about the movie. Instead of asking for a movie to get Academy consideration, they’ll pray for it just to get the Cinematography nomination or for that one supporting character to show up in the 5 nominees. I like that, because they are usually right about that one thing. In the case of Pig, it’s a good enough movie, but Cage is the highlight.

 

Pig is a weirdly lovely movie that Cage makes work. The story is that a loner truffle hunter gets his pig stolen then dives into the Portland cooking underworld to get it back. That is a dumb story. Perfect for Nic Cage. I sometimes forget he is an Oscar winner. The trick to him is that he’ll bring everything to a role and he needs a filmmaker who can resist asking for him to give everything all the time. Pig is a wild movie, yet it repeatedly holds back from going fully insane. So Cage’s performance becomes a case of “he can’t burn himself if you don’t hand him a match”. I really enjoy how subdued the conclusion of the film ultimately is. It builds the legend of Robin Feld effectively without it crossing into being a joke.

 

Nic Cage is only 58, which feels wild. He’s been around and active so long that it seems like he should be older. He’s got a lot of time left in his career. There’s a very real possibility that he’s in an actual Oscar discussion for something in a decade, and people will point to films like Pig as evidence that he’s been doing under-the-radar good work for a while. Pig could be to Cage what Mud was to the McConaissance.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend