unbearable-weight-movie

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Any career that can last for four decades is impressive, but there’s something singular about the career arc of Nicolas Cage, he’s been an action star, a comedy lead, and an Academy Award winner. The most high-profile and prolific member of the Coppolas – a royal family of Hollywood – Cage has stuck around long enough to see himself go from a bankable lead to a bonafide movie star to a punch line to a highly respected legend. The Cage Mythology – an internet-friendly phenomenon that often borders on mean-spirited, if it doesn’t outright spill over – has become synonymous with the man himself. The vocal bombast, the larger-than-life clothing, the peculiar choice of roles, and just the sheer volume of movies; it all adds up to man whose eccentric lifestyle has taken on the drama of his films. In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, that point is made explicit.

The movie feels like a reddit pitch come to life: the protagonist is Cage himself. An actor whose glory days are behind him and whose family life is eroding. His daughter, Addy (Lily Mo Sheen), is tired of his lack of interest in her life, and his persistence in forcing her to enjoy his favorite old movies. Addy’s mother, Olivia (Sharon Horgan), knows better than to have any expectations, but she pleads with him to at least become a better father. After desperately lobbying for a part in a movie by David Gordon Green (who also makes an appearance as himself), he begins to question his place in the business. His agent offers one gig: spend a weekend in Mallorca for a rich fan’s birthday party to the tune of a million bucks. Against his better judgment, Nic agrees, and decides it’s his last gig before retirement.

So there’s the hook: Cage interrogates the highs and lows of his storied career through an intertextual fiction about his own legacy. Despite its meta appearance, Massive Talent is almost exclusively a fiction, not accounting for the complications of Cage’s actual five marriages, his notoriously expensive taste and erratic behavior; not to mention his issues with the IRS. The movie (written by director Tom Gormican with Kevin Etten) instead creates a rather hackneyed deadbeat dad figure whose main crime is making Addy watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and working too much. It’s a testament to the histrionics of Cage’s actual life that the fictionalized version here comes off as quaint by comparison, but there does appear to be a missed opportunity. It’s not like Cage is an actor who would shy away from a more piercing portrait.

But that’s not what we get here. Instead, we’re treated mostly to a buddy comedy between Cage and Javi Gutierrez (a charming Pedro Pascal), an eccentric billionaire and budding screenwriter whose obsession with Cage rivals the most devout internet poster. Javi has a vault filled with priceless memorabilia and an encyclopedic knowledge of the actor’s entire filmography (the movie that hooked him? The 1994 comedy Guarding Tess). At first creeped out, Cage is eventually won over when the two bond over their love of films old and new (Javi teaches Nic of the wonders of Paddington 2). There’s one snag, Javi is actually an arms dealer involved in the kidnapping of the Catalonian president’s daughter. Cage is approached by two American intelligence officers (Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz) who contract him to spy on their behalf, hoping to rescue the girl and bring down Javi’s operation.

By its final act, Massive Talent becomes more of a no-holds-barred action thriller, which is actually when the film works the most, approaching the kind of absurdity that this material deserves. It even juices the comedy to another level. Before that, most of the entertainment came from the amount of fun Cage and Pascal appeared to be having with one another, which is not always passed down to the audience. One narrative motif that recurs throughout is Cage being visited by a younger version of himself (Cage in de-aging VFX, seemingly Wild at Heart era) who arrives as a simultaneous angel-and-devil on his shoulder to criticize his stasis and pump up his ego. Like most of the film, it’s more charming in concept than it is in execution, and has less to do with a real critical conception of Cage than a paint-by-numbers movie version.

 

 

Directed by Tom Gormican