Pig has Nicolas Cage as a hermit living out in the woods who uses a pig to find truffles, which he sells to a young restaurateur. Unfortunately, a couple meth tweakers kidnap her, and Cage, with the help of the restaurateur, needs to go into the restaurant underbelly of Portland, OR to track her down. Along the way, we learn more about Cage's character's past, and what he meant to the Portland restaurant scene. The young restaurateur's father, played by Adam Arkin, turns out to be a heavy hitter in the Portland restaurant industry. What does he have to do with the missing pig? And how will Cage confront him?
(Keep in mind that I can't get into this film without spoilers, so if you haven't seen this yet, read on at your own risk--or take a break, watch Pig, and then come back.)
I thought this was a fantastic movie, but what I thought really worked, in talking it over with Mitch, was how the film used an anti-action approach to the action. In fact, the only real action sequence was when Cage's character is beaten up by a restaurant worker in this underground game, but the aggression on Cage's end was in taking the beating. We have other sequences where, in a standard action film the hero would be using physical violence to get what he needs, but Cage's character uses a kind of emotional violence. Like a scene where he's at another fancy restaurant, talking to his former sous chef who ran the place. In an action movie, he might slam the guy's head into the table, maybe twist his arm behind his back, and get him to talk. In this film though, he knows the character's emotional weak point: that he wanted to own a small corner pub, and he hits that point aggressively, in a way that forces the sous chef to breakdown and tell him what he needs--he emotionally deconstructs the sous chef the way the chef served deconstructed dishes at his fancy restaurant. Then for the final confrontation, Cage gives the young restaurateur (Alex Wolff) a list of items, the way the hero in an action movie would be gathering arms or setting up his traps to defeat the baddie; but Cage uses the items he asks for to recreate a meal with Arkin that, again, is emotionally aggressive and causes Arkin to break. Considering all the action films we do, this idea of "anti-action," or "anti-physical aggression action," is really fascinating, and it was cool to see how well it was executed.
A big part of why it worked was Cage's performance. With me not knowing what this movie was about, I thought this would just be a fun, quirky Cage as a hermit role, which probably would've worked well enough for me; but Cage takes this role and gives us something much more. This is now Cage's sixth film on the DTVC, and I think this is his best work out of those--Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans though was a great one too. When we went on our unplanned hiatus in 2015, there was a thought that Cage was going to be another DTVC Hall of Famer, it was just a matter of time, but this is the first film of his we've done since I've been back, and I don't know how many of his DTV flicks that we'll get to, in part because a lot of the roles he's done since the mid-2010s seem like they might be more indie flicks like this than the DTV flicks we're used to on the site. Maybe that'll change, or maybe I'll find more to go to--one good future Wild Card is Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, that felt more like a DTV film than this, but also grossed over $150 million worldwide. Either way, this was the Cage I loved from the 90s turning in a stirring performance that reminded me why I love watching him so much.
One area that I initially had trouble with was the fact that we find out at the end that the pig died, but I read into it some more, and found out that this film could be inspired by Greek mythology, and that Arkin's character was acting as the Hades. It explains a lot, and with that in mind I'm more okay with it. We find out that Cage went into seclusion after losing his wife, and in a way, the search for the pig could be like a metaphor for him going into the underworld to save his companion, when really it was letting go of the wife that was preventing him from living. I don't know enough about Greek mythology to get it all for sure, but metaphorically, I was better able to accept that the pig had died, and while I liked the pig and wanted her to live, I don't know that I would've gotten the movie I wanted with that kind of ending. Also, if Adam Arkin was playing Hades as a powerful restaurant mogul, he did a great job, both stoic and cold, but stern and fair.
We harp on runtime a lot, not just me, but also a lot of fellow reviewers in this ecosystem. What we're really harping on when we say that is padding or bad pacing that causes us to be disinterested: why give us two hours when you can get it done in 88 minutes? In the trivia for this, we found out the distributors had director Michael Sarnoski cut an hour out, meaning this 92-minute gem was originally supposed to be a 152-minute behemoth? The thing is, this 92-minute production feels like the perfect length. Nothing is wasted, the pace is good and deliberate, and I don't know that we lost anything by not having anything in that additional hour. Had this been the original 152-minutes, I never would've considered it for the podcast, but I also don't know that it would've worked anywhere near as well. For the people who think we're too hyper-focused on runtimes, maybe we're onto something.
Finally, choosing the Portland, OR restaurant scene for the setting was fantastic. The rainy weather could double for Hades's underworld, but also the idea that the city that was the inspiration for Portlandia could have this kind of dark underbelly was perfect. It was uniquely Portland. I've only been to Portland, OR once, on a day trip while I was visiting my sister, who was living in Seattle at the time. I got some Voodoo Donuts, and visited Powell's Books and a black velvet painting museum that had been featured on No Reservations. I remember we went to a pizza place, and I ordered two slices, and the kid behind the counter cracked "you need a box for one of those?" as if there was no way I could finish two of their "big" pizza slices in one setting. Of course me, the brash Northeasterner, not only said no, but after I ate my two slices, I went up and got a third, which didn't matter as much because the original guy's shift was over so he was gone, but I felt like I still needed to prove a point. Anyway, that's Portland in a nutshell, as best as I can tell, and I'm not sure what that says about this film being set there, but as I watched this, the whole thing felt like the vibe of Voodoo Donuts, black velvet painting museums, and clerks who crack foxy about how many slices of pizza they think you can eat in one setting.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently catch this on Hulu. If you've read this far but haven't seen it yet, you may not want to now knowing how the film ends; but I think for the Cage performance, and for the way this film depicts an "anti-physical aggression" form of violence, it's worth checking out.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11003218
And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
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