Pig (2021)

Score: 2 / 5

Nicolas Cage has been making a lot of crap his whole career, and never more than the last couple of years with an onslaught of VOD releases, each looking as horrendous as the last. Now solidly out of his blockbuster phase, he occasionally does something right; so do at least a few of the movies he chooses to be part of. Mandy, for example, and Color Out of Space are stunning pieces that deserved much wider audiences. Then there's Pig, his latest and perhaps most nuanced work yet as an actor. Not because he's doing his Nicolas Cage thing, but because he's not, and the movie is smart enough to steer us away from anything like his oeuvre.

Cage plays Robin Feld, opening the film as a sort of Henry David Thoreau (or, rather, Christopher Thomas Knight), a recluse alone in the deep woods living off the land. He has apparently no companion apart from the titular pig, appropriately named Pig. Together, they hunt truffles in the dank forests of the Pacific Northwest, somewhere near Portland; Pig has quite a nose for scrumptious fungi, and we see Rob cooking some up in a rudimentary pan. The two get along grandly, only interrupted on occasion by a young man who sells Rob's truffles in the city and brings him any necessities that allow Rob to continue living off the grid. We're given only the barest of information about Rob, but his introductory sequence reveals he's harboring debilitating grief over a woman whose cassette tape he's unwilling or unable to endure hearing.

Rob is suddenly assaulted in the middle of the night and his beloved porcine pal is stolen, screaming helplessly. Waking bloody and battered in the morning light, Rob gets in his hidden emergency car and drives to find Amir, his seller. With the young man's help connecting suppliers with buyers, Rob follows his intuition into Portland, climbing the surprisingly seedy ladder of truffle connoisseurs to locate Pig. He's pretty sure he knows where she is, and he has a good idea who has her; this is not made clear by his limited dialogue but by his actions, which are silently determined and few in number. He keeps moving, forcing Amir (and us) to seek the logic behind and through his behavior. Cage plays Rob close to his chest, an inspired move from one of the most unhinged and anti-instinctual actors working today, and no matter how abused he gets, he never cracks open his cringiest, Cage-iest fount of performative hooey.

Unfortunately, that's one of the only things the movie is smart enough to do. Don't mistake me: I'm grateful this didn't turn into a violent revenge-thriller that further demonized rural men as piggy brutes (looking at you, Deliverance). I was almost certain that's where it was going, especially given the bleak aesthetic established immediately by stoic cinematography, Gothic-Romantic in scope and style, and the droning symphonic score. It felt like a burgeoning Robert Eggers horror movie more than once in its early scenes. Then, of course, there's the plot, which began just like John Wick: man loves animal, man loses animal, man goes on hunt for animal, man becomes animal on hunt. Major differences, apart from the animal itself, include Cage looking like Leo in The Revenant and an utter lack of stylization in any choreography, stunt work, production design, costuming, or much of anything else. Conversely, the world of Pig is the real world, albeit an impressionistic one.

And I think that's what I hated most about this movie. It's deeply impressionistic, both in content and in delivery. Its entire focus is the interior world of Rob -- a dark, brooding man who internalizes everything around him -- even as it takes that perspective as its presentation of the world around him. Shot in entirely natural lighting, the film is so chromatically dark that it is draining to watch, especially as the visuals move from graceful pans and tracking shots to nausea-inducing extreme close-ups by handheld camera. But, locked as it is within Rob's mind, the movie hamstrings itself by never granting us access to him, both because of Cage's cagey performance and because of the screenplay's unwillingness to round out his character.

Rob's vapid existence on screen is only slightly disguised by occasional fiery moments as he attempts to interrogate potential pignappers. First it's Amir, then a rival truffle-supplier, then two strung-out junkies who admit to taking the pig for a mysterious wealthy man. At this point, if you don't suspect the villain is Amir's father, you might be asleep. We learn that his father, played by Adam Arkin, is in a similar business to his son, and the two had made an arrangement not to step on each other's toes; apparently the successes of Rob and Pig violated that, although that crucial detail is the most ambiguous part of the whole understated movie. Rob, still searching, ends up confronting a chef who used to work for him in a restaurant (yes, Rob was apparently a master chef before his partner and wife died). In what might be the most revealing scene of the movie, Rob uses an incisive yet softly-spoken verbal barrage to devastate his former employee, forcing him to admit that his life is a lie and a sham, and that his dream of owning a classic pub would be more fulfilling than the high-end success story he's eked out for himself. It's not abuse, and not really even an attack, but it leaves the other man badly shaken, apparently on the verge of a breakdown.

The heavyhanded screenplay and direction leave much to be desired, as well. Impressionism is a good key to understanding how and why the movie tries to work, as it locks us into Rob's limited experience and grounds our senses in his physical presence. Similarly, its seeming obsession with symbolism and shorthand appear to do the work of creating a fully-fleshed world, even as the meaning or even accessible interpretive lenses are disregarded, if not completely absent. There are no women of consequence; the only females that matter are the pig (taken), Rob's deceased wife (whose death destroyed his life), and Amir's mother, who he says committed suicide, and so the absence of women arguably mobilizes the film. What about the absurdly on-the-nose name of the restaurant wherein Rob finally learns who stole Pig: Eurydice, where too the chef's dreams went to die? And then there are the truffles themselves, delectable fungi sought after for consumerist bourgeois masses, literally life from death becoming capital in a world bereft of love. It's all just a little too groaningly obvious; I wondered often if there would be a final-act twist of the knife, something nasty and unexpected to justify the gloom and weight of this unbearably melancholic drama. No such luck.

On the other hand, Alex Wolff is transcendental to watch as Amir, and the only reason I didn't totally detest this flick. Much like Robert Pattinson in The Devil All the Time and some now-character actors who were once great and are now just a lot of fun (Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Giamatti, Jeff Goldblum), Wolff leans heavily into his greasy yuppie-type salesman. Clearly too young for his yellow hot rod and the thin moustache he grooms fastidiously, Amir likes having money and wants to make his own at any cost. As he accompanies the grizzled mess that is Rob around Portland, Amir's neurotic anxieties bleed through his freshly pressed armor. Apart from Wolff's attention to posture and gesture, his nervousness seeps into his dialogue, as when he describes Rob variously as a Buddhist, a clown, and a Christ figure. Amir is keenly self-aware, though, and he knows he lacks substance in every metric; we most frequently see him slicking back his hair in any available reflective surface and sitting in his car obsessively listening to classical music and educational lessons. He's trying far too hard -- using the easiest path to self-improvement -- to gain the class and culture he feels he deserves. Or, perhaps, needs, although that suspicion is foiled when we finally meet his father.

Some people may like Pig, with its vague messaging about picking the things you love carefully and guarding them. Its themes of overcoming isolation and engaging with the wider world, however, are notably nihilistic, something we don't normally see in straight melodramas. Despite what we might consider its primary journey (Rob learning to accept his grief and deal with the loss of his love), this is a profoundly ugly movie about misery and miserable people. On one side, we have a misanthrope who can't function in society after his bereavement; on the other, a man in almost the same situation who decides to prey on others and become the best he can be at any cost. Is it a critique of capitalism, or of men? Either way, it's not pretty. It's also incredibly boring, much like Nomadland, Roma, and a slew of other awards darlings that have never much captured this viewer's attention.

At least this one has a hilarious Alex Wolff to rely on, if only in small doses.