Pig

Pig

Director - Michael Sarnoski

Writers - Vanessa Block & Michael Sarnoski

Stars – Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin

 

Anyone coming for shouty madcap Cage will be sorely disappointed, because here he is totally in service to the prose of the film as a whole, not just punctuation. It’s a quiet, towering Sasquatch of a performance. Going in knowing very little – they steal his pig; he wants it back – I probably thought it would go the ‘John Wick’, ‘Nobody’ route, and indeed it is filmed with those beats in place, albeit in a very sombre register. But it’s not that either, for it has different goals. For a start, it’s almost so washed out that it’s austere, and it is slow, committedly serious and deliberate and ends on a great, bare bones cover of Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’. It’s a mood piece.

 

(And I feel the need to put a reminder that you should stop reading now if you haven’t seen the film.)

 

Those action-revenge beats are in place: there’s illegal fights, a wealthy nemesis, and Rob spends most of the film with a bloody beard (which nevertheless doesn’t stop him from getting to a prestige restaurant; and he must smell a treat too). And indeed, it’s as if John Wick’s superpowers were a photographic memory and legendary culinary skills instead of super-assassin past. Cage is Rob, a committed hermit with the required irascibility, earning cash as a truffle hunter and selling to Alex Wolff. But these are characters to be coloured-in, and the character study that emerges is one of a talented man scarred irreparably by grief and a fatalism and over-sensitivity; an over-sensitivity, we might guess, compounded and made unbearable by that photographic memory. Rob’s intelligence and empathy becomes increasingly evident and is never clearer than when he is confronting/talking to the restaurant chef (a sublime scene between David Knell and Cage at the peak of their control).

 

It’s a film concerned with subtle shifts, and although Alex Wolff as Amir is often shoved aside as a used and abused observer, and although we don’t get to see it, one could imagine these events have changed him more than anyone. His is a fine performance of natural empathy trying to get out from under the veneer of bolshy business hotshot.

 

Where you might think it is leading to an explosive showdown of some kind… but the showdown is the making of a meal rather than a shootout. The methodology is repeatedly to set up an to undercut expectations. Again, the film follows the beats of a vengeance thriller, even to leaving him a hermit with his tapes which a shallow action film would see as a poignant character beat, but the residual feeling here is different: there’s no satisfaction of “he’s had his vengeance and now everything is back in its rightful place”. ‘Pig’ is after something else: a story of what we care about and the husks it makes of us when that’s taken away.