“Pig”

 Be aware: SPOILERS AHEAD for “Pig”! You read this at your own risk!

Every once in a while, Nicolas Cage comes along with a performance to remind us that he is a great actor. 

Every once in a while, a film comes along that you want to tell everyone to go see.

Every once in a while, those two elements converge. 

In a career littered with remarkable performances, Cage delivers a massive, beautiful, reflective, and introspective turn here. He plays Rob, a former chef whose presence inspired awe and reverence in some, and dismissal in others later into the film.

Too often, Cage is thought of as an over-the-top performer, a guy who will take any role, and sadly regarded as undisciplined. Nothing could be farther from the truth: he knows the roles and the movies he takes, he’s also said quite frankly that he can’t stand to not work. But he has no illusions; his direct-to-video work is pretty much just that. However, he commits to those roles as much as to anything like “Adaptation”, “Joe”, “Mandy” or the current film about a man and his pig.

The set-up is that Rob lives in the Oregon woods, off the grid, with his truffle hunting companion, and is visited on Thursdays by a truffle seller, Amir played beautifully by Alex Wolff (“Hereditary”). Rob is at pains to talk to Amir but Amir makes an effort to be chatty as Rob shuts the door to his cabin while Amir is holding forth. 

Much is established at the outset by Cage’s performance; his silence, mostly. When he does speak, it’s gently to the pig and to Amir, not at all. He puts a cassette tape in a boom box, a woman’s voice tells him it’s his birthday. He turns off the player. We put together the trauma of deep loss in a very few short scenes. Then all hell breaks loose.

Pig is sniffing at the door and as Rob gets up to investigate, the door swings open and in short order, is beat unconscious as the pig-napping executes. All of this, I cannot stress enough, is rendered directly, no fancy cuts, no ersatz sound effects; it happens quickly and definitively. 

“I want my pig.”

Anyone who hears a short synopsis of the story or who has seen the previews could be forgiven for thinking that this might be “John Wick” but with a pig instead of a dog as the trigger for vengeance. But Robin doesn’t want vengeance. He just wants the pig and because the film is so beautifully constructed and with such heart, there is nothing preposterous about this.

Rob comes to and makes his way down the highway to a diner where he calls Amir to help him track his porcine companion. They get to a farmer’s market of sorts and when Rob tells one of the vendors that someone made off with his pig, the woman takes him right to the tweaked couple who confess they have no idea who they sold the pig to; some rich guy is about it.

Rob tell Amir to take him to Portland and at first, Amir says no, he has a reputation (he really has no idea what Rob will do and honestly, if the eccentric guy you buy truffles from lives with a pig in the woods off the grid and looks like Nic Cage with matted hair and a beard of Moses proportions, you might be forgiven for thinking he could be unstable. Rob essentially makes the case that if Amir wants to continue to be able to buy the truffles that he’s attempting to build a career on, he best help Rob in finding his friend.

There’s a gorgeous and somewhat terrifying montage as they enter the city. From Rob’s point of view, the disorientation is visceral and the cinematography by Patrick Scola is lush and evocative throughout.

Their first stop is Edgar, a bearded round faced man who tells Rob he doesn’t count for much anymore and obviously won’t help him find his pig. Rob returns to Amir and says they’ll wait till midnight. As the time approaches, Rob has Amir take him to a restaurant where they walk through the kitchen and into what looks like a deserted store room in search of the Portland Hotel. Amir tells Rob there’s no such place and Rob informs him that he hotel was torn down fifteen years ago, but the basement remained. 

As they enter a hole in the wall hidden behind dried goods in the storage area, they walk along a dark corridor as Rob explains that Edgar oversees underground fights. Not quite bum fights, but from what we see, beat-downs where one man stands and takes a pounding for sixty seconds. Make it a minute, win hundreds of dollars. 

Rob walks over to the chalkboard, erases the other names and scrawls “Robin Feld” at the top. The crowd goes quiet and muttering begins. Stacks of cash are set out and Rob clasps his hands behind his back as his diminutive assailant beats the tar out of him for a minute straight. 

Let me reiterate: there is nothing glamorous about this. We are as far from “John Wick” as Ingmar Bergman is from Nicholas Winding Refn. (A case could be made that’s not so far, but I’ll leave that imperfect analogy where it is.) Rob rises from his thrashing, slowly and hurting and staggers over to Edgar, who simply hands him a piece of paper.

The paper gives up the name of a highly exclusive restaurant in Portland, one that Amir is ill-at-ease getting Rob into. His father owns it. At this point, we begin to see the focus shift ever so: Amir comes into the field of vision with his own story and Michael Sarnoski and Vanessa Block’s tale gains another significant layer (several, really) of significance. 

Rob questions Amir about his dad and we discover his father is pretty damaged goods. His mother killed herself, so Amir says as he tries to put a brave face on by saying it was bound to happen. He is spending so much time attempting to prove himself to his father by running this truffle business and making a name for himself and pursuing some kind of self-improvement with a fancy car and classical music appreciation courses. Writing that makes it sound comical, but it’s anything but. 

As played by Wolff, Amir is hugely vulnerable; he play-acts the player before the mirror but grovels to get the reservations and once in the restaurant (and yes, it is a pretentious fuck of a place in a low-key faux humble way), we watch his face change as Robin confronts the chef. 

The chef, Finway, had worked for Robin for two months before he was fired for over-cooking pasta (seriously, I would have done the same) but Robin remembered the chef’s dream of opening a pub and asks him why didn’t pursue that dream. Robin doesn’t hammer at the chef, but he quietly deconstructs the sham of the foodie scene he’s in and underscores how little anyone around him cares about him, how little a presence he is, and how, even to himself, he doesn’t exist, really. 

David Knell’s Finway slowly erodes before our eyes. Robin isn’t cutting him up for fun or to be mean; he’s simply stating a truth or truths that Finway himself knows and is deeply aware of. He also knows who knows who has the pig. Someone you don’t want to make angry, he says. It doesn’t take a detective to put together that that guy is Amir’s father.

“We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.”

Rob said those words to Finway, but it becomes clear to Amir that is precisely why Rob is on this quest for his pig. Before that, however, Rob lets loose rage upon Amir and his car and essentially tells him that if he won’t take him to his father, he’ll go alone. The scene from parking lot to Rob visiting his old house (a gentle sequence with a kid on the back stoop and Rob telling the little guy about a persimmon tree and its fruit) to Rob stealing a bike to get over to Amir’s dad’s house should feel digressive but doesn’t. It’s all of a piece.

We see Amir’s dad waiting for Rob and as played by Adam Arkin, Darius is a mixture of tough guy menace cut through with a sense of searing loss. Darius tells Rob that he’s nothing and that Rob has been watching him all these years and how Amir isn’t cut out for the business and will wind up with a middle management office job. If Rob goes back to his house in the woods, Darius will send him enough money for another pig.

Rob asks him if Darius changed when his wife died. Darius retorts with a similar question to Rob. He tells Rob to get out of his house.

In the street is Amir waiting for Rob, apologizing for having told his father about him and Amir seems ready to draw this down, but instead Rob gives him a shopping list. We follow Amir to a woman named Jezebel who leads him to a wine cellar and shows him Lori Feld’s crematory remains locker. “I’m saving the one next to hers for Rob. You can tell him…” Rob, in the meantime, has gone to visit a baker who took over what we can assume was Rob and Lori’s restaurant.

“You’re a chef. I’m a baker.” Rob asks her for a salted baguette and she gives him a couple of pastries, as well. When Rob notes that the curtains are gone, the woman replies that Lori wanted to take them down; Rob says it looks better that way.

Along his “shopping trip”, Amir stopped off to visit his mother and tell her that he’d met the man that cooked her the meal that made her and his dad so happy that night so many years before. “You’d like him”, he says…followed by “why doesn’t he just let you die?” A nurse comes up and says she has to clean her tracheotomy tube and does Amir want to go in and see her. He says no but we catch, ever so quickly, a look of sadness if not despair on his face as the camera shifts to mid shot from his mother’s bed as the nurse enters the room. 

By this point, the sense of loss that was felt from one perspective fans out to everyone. Everyone. Finding his pig is the one loss that Rob feels he can stop. Does Amir join him in the hope that maybe he can find himself? Or even find something in his father? 

We see Amir and Rob enter Darius’s house and begin to cook the meal that was so indelible for Darius and his wife all those years ago. The wine, as well. With some determined coaxing (“We cooked dinner for you”) from Amir, his father comes out and takes a seat at the table. Rob eats first and nudges his companions to do the same. No dialog, just - what? - a study in pain in Adam Arkin’s Darius who breaks down: “Why are you doing this?” 

He shouts and leaves the table to retreat to his office. Rob pushes back from the table and the next scene is Darius telling him that he couldn’t save the pig. The kidnappers didn’t know what they were doing and she died. The soundtrack goes silent as we see Rob sink to the floor in a performance of anguish I haven’t seen the likes of in many years. 

We cut to a shot of Rob’s matted hair blowing in the night air with the car mirror out of focus in what feels as dreamlike as any scene in this film and much of it is oneiric. From the bucolic opening to the descent into Portland’s nightscape and the rather exceptional turns of narrative that are treated so matter-of-factly, we have been inhabiting a fever dream of loss and sadness leavened now and again with a kind of gentle wit and genuinely rich compassion. 

The sky is growing lighter as Rob and Amir come out of a diner. Rob says he’s going to walk home and Amir asks him if he’s okay. Rob says yes and says he’ll see him next Thursday. They shake hands and Rob walks away. The last scenes are Rob returning to his cabin, placing the cassette in the player and what follows is not a grand revelation but a moving, gentle gift. 

I am glad that I can’t convey the depths of the performances or, for that matter, of the film itself. I wish I could tell you how it genuinely is funny in parts (“he’s a buddhist” Amir tells his friend when you can see the latter’s perplexity at Rob’s appearance) and the deep wisdom of the way Rob is written and with which he imbues him without making him out to be some kind of saint. After Amir has told Rob about his parents and mother’s “suicide”, Rob places all of these lives into a grander context of a probable apocalypse that will strike the Pacific Northwest. Watching that scene between Wolff and Cage, I thought it was at first a peculiar, self-involved way to respond to a young man’s torment; but I realized that Rob was saying that as much for himself and Amir. 

I was being facetious earlier when I wrote about all hell breaking loose, by the way. Yes, there are two bursts of physical violence over its running time, but the real conflicts are more studied and render those two bursts smaller in context. The contexts of loss and bearing the responsibilities of our lives and falling into the odd paths that we do and the tensions between our choices and our paths run deeply through the entire narrative. 

For a first time feature, Sarnoski has proven himself to be one to watch. Vanessa Block, who provided the story and is one of the producers of the film, also produced, wrote, and directed “The Testimony”, a documentary about the largest rape tribunal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a couple of years back. There’s likely more of a story behind their collaboration on this than I’ve been able to find, but I suggest checking out her website fo find out more about her.

If you’ve read this, I have to really emphasize that you may have missed the joy of being pleasantly surprised. It’s a testimony to the film, however, if you see it anyway, and come away appreciating it as much as I.