Pig: A truffle hunter's search for a lost pig may be Nicolas Cage's least hammy performance
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
When Nicolas Cage starred in Werner Herzog’s underappreciated Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Herzog confirmed he had a pet phrase for calling Cage to “Action!” It was, “Set loose the pig!”
It reflected that portion of Cage’s career that sometimes seemed more like gestalt therapy than acting, a collection of over-the-top rage moments inevitably and hilariously strung together in viral YouTube videos.
Ironically, when he finally got a chance to star in a movie called Pig (opening Friday in theatres), it would not be that Nicolas Cage we would end up seeing.
The truffle hunting title character in Pig, and Nicolas Cage as its best friend.
Pig, directed and co-written by Michael Sarnoski, is a morose, fascinating, layered tale that begins with a hermit in the Oregon forest (Cage), passing his days collecting sellable fungus with his beloved truffle pig. One violent moment later, the movie begins morphing into a social critique of hipsterism and the empty values of, ahem, the Portland restaurant star system.
Along the way, it stops for a Fight Club moment (with an interesting twist), forces a trendy chef-of-the-moment to re-examine his life, and posits loss as a destroyer of the soul.
Through it all, Cage takes a lot of hard hits, physical and metaphorical, but he never raises his hand in anger.
We learn little about the truffle-hunter “Rob” for some time, save for the fact that he has a very special pig, whose fine fungal finds are sold in the city by an ambitious young restaurant supplier named Amir (Alex Wolff). In his spare time, Rob shares food with his porcine friend and listens to old cassettes of love messages from a (we can assume long-lost) young woman.
That is, until one night, when a truck pulls up, Rob is knocked unconscious, and his pig is taken, squealing into the night.
Most people seeing this movie cold will simply assume that a revenge rampage with the words, “Give me back my pig!” is about to be ignited, it being Nic Cage and all.
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But Cage, whose dead-pan (and bloodied) expression seldom changes in Pig’s 91-minute running time, adopts an almost serene sense of single-minded determination. He conscripts Amir to be his driver (on the premise that the truffle dealer will take a financial hit if the pig is not found), and they head to Portland, with whose ins and outs Rob is surprisingly familiar.
It turns out Rob is an escapee from that scene, a former top chef who’d let go of that life with both hands, and is actually assumed to be dead. But he knows enough to know where to find the best truffles, and follow truffle gossip.
The pig in Pig is a MacGuffin, a vehicle for a movie about loss – loss of a beloved animal, loss of a mother, loss of a lover, loss of self. The hollowed out quality of a survivor of loss is best embodied by the criminal kingpin Darius (Adam Arkin), who, true to his historic name, is the king of all he surveys in hipster-ville. And yet, he is a cruel shell of a man.
If this seems like a bit of a deep dive when the subject is trendy restaurants in Portland, Pig is a serious movie with heady themes that just happens to come at you from oblique and unexpected angles.
Sometimes less really is more. And if Cage really has tamed his “pig,” his performance suggests he just might teach it some subtle new tricks worth watching.
Pig. Directed by Michael Sarnoski, written by Vanessa Block and Michael Sarnoski. Stars Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff and Adam Arkin. Opens in theatres Friday, July 16, with a streaming date to be announced.