In the Flesh: Pig

Nicholas Cage has been a lot of things throughout his long and prolific acting career. Oddball Indie leading man, Hollywood superstar, coked-out weirdo, C-list jobber, and, most recently, a sort of walking meme à la Keanu Reeves — a cutout of himself cast at least as much for the “haha, it’s Nick Cage!” factor as for any merit he possesses as an actor. In Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, he touches something much simpler and more profound than his erratic acting legacy, slipping outside the ongoing cultural conversation about his talent or lack thereof to prove deftly and finally that he has it in him to be great. As reclusive and taciturn ex chef Robin Feld, Cage has a sad-eyed charisma that smooths over even the film’s more painfully earnest moments, digging through the script’s first-timer jitters and Sarnoski’s ill-advised shaky camerawork to something bittersweet and meaningful, a man whose grief permeates every aspect of his life without defining his personhood or passions.

The degree of earnestness Pig achieves without tipping over into schlocky sentimentality is admirable, especially considering it’s Sarnoski’s debut feature. Scenes in which Cage monologues about the nature of passion to a sellout former employee, reducing the man to nervous tears in his own restaurant, risk absurdity in order to grasp at something vitally fundamental about the link between human self-conception and artistic endeavor. It’s a gutsy move, one that might have easily backfired and dissolved into a welter of hacky moralizing, but Cage, who spends the entire film in the same filthy clothes, face battered and bloody, hair wild, gives it a tragic weight, like something uttered by a holy ascetic. Without a word spoken he brings the same gravitas to restaurant supply tyrant Darius’s (Adam Arkin) experience of eating a meal he and his late wife had treasured, his silent understanding a perfect canvas against which Arkin’s slow-motion heartbreak unfolds.

Watching Feld cook is a singular pleasure, too. In an early scene he makes a pastry crust from scratch while his pig looks on, curious. Cage’s thick fingers cut butter through the flour and salt, crushing simple ingredients together until they become soft and thin and uniform, a crust laid lovingly over a baking tin. What does he fill it with? A quiche, a pie, a tart? Like the film, the point is not the end result, but the process, the act of making as an invitation for joy and memory to come into one’s life. It’s that openness more than anything that makes Cage’s performance sing, a sense that for all that this man lives closed off from the world, it isn’t because he’s joyless or in mourning. Watch him share a salted baguette with a friend, or briskly and without complaint accept a beating in order to find a lead on who might have his pig, and you’ll understand he’s left the city and its turmoil not just because of loss, but because he’s found other ways to feel alive.