Don’t Mess with Nicolas Cage’s Pig

I n Pig, a fat, hairy, graying old kook is living happily in the woods when his only friend, a truffle pig, gets kidnapped. So he goes after the pignappers with vengeance on his mind. It’s Taken meets bacon. Except the hermit is played by Nicolas Cage. So it’s ham meets bacon.

Given Cage’s history of, shall we say, indelicate acting, people have started grading him on a curve: Any movie performance in which he doesn’t spend 15 minutes screaming manically gets marked down as “restrained” or “nuanced.” So he’s winning acclaim again for this role. But he lacks subtlety in a different way in Pig. This time he spends the entire movie looking anguished and tortured. He even gets himself beaten up in a fight club for no real reason except it means he gets to play the rest of the movie with giant fake bruises stuck to his face. Put it this way: At no point did I forget that I was watching a Nicolas Cage performance. This supposedly heartfelt little drama feels forced from beginning to end.

Directed and co-written by Michael Sarnoski, Pig is neither fish nor fowl. It’s too slow, quiet, and lacking in action, even a real climax, to score as a thriller. But it’s too gimmicky and contrived to hit like an intense indie character study. It starts out looking as if it’s going to be a pumped-up foodie revenge story: “I’m looking . . . for my pig!” But midway through, it morphs into more of a foodie authenticity narrative. It starts out as “John Wick with an ungulate” and at some point turns into Ratatouille.

For me the air starts to go out of this balloon when we finally learn who Cage’s Robin Feld is. After many scenes in which it is hinted he is no ordinary man — he lives in a cabin with no electricity, his only contact with the outside world being the guy who brings him supplies such as batteries in exchange for the truffles he finds with his prize pig — we start to suspect he’s some sort of superspy or professional assassin. Instead, it turns out the guy is a chef. A chef? What’s he going to do when he catches the bad guys, cook them a nice meal? Wait, hang on, that’s exactly what happens. Instead of a weapons-loading scene, there’s an ingredients-gathering scene. I’m not giving anything away; the how of it is where the story lies. The Cage character is like Mel Gibson meets Paul Prudhomme.

I’m not sure why Pig seems to be exciting critics, but I think it has something to do with the foodie aura to the thing. You may find the film a bit mesmerizing if you buy into food fanaticism, what with all of the characters deep-sniffing truffles or groping fresh ingredients as though they’re getting lucky on a first date, or going a bit spacey as they place a forkful of food in their mouths. I call bushwa. I say food doesn’t actually matter much.

According to this movie, two people who are stuck in a disastrous relationship can be turned all lovey-dovey for an evening by a single great meal. No. Great meals do not rewire people’s personalities, even temporarily. If people hate each other, they’re going to go right back to arguing afterwards. Hell, they might even argue during the meal, whose taste probably won’t even register with them. If they really can’t stand each other, they might prefer to pick up their escargots au beurre d’ail and fling them in each other’s faces. A meal doesn’t bring deep spiritual happiness, it doesn’t act like Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth; it merely entertains your mouth for the ten minutes it takes to eat it, if you can actually be bothered to savor it, which most people can’t. These days foodies are more interested in photographing their entrées than in eating them.

Cage’s character stands for the principle of pure, unadorned foodie pleasure, divorced from all of the hubbub that attaches itself to dining. There’s a centerpiece scene set in what’s meant to be the trendiest haute-cuisine restaurant in Portland, Ore. We’re in a room full of the richest, most au courant diners between San Francisco and Seattle and . . . they’re too dumb to know that what they’re eating is pretentious garbage! A waitress reads a passage from the Big Book of Foodie Gibberish (“Today’s journey begins by uniting the depths of the sea with the riches of our forests. We’ve emulsified a locally sourced . . .”) and builds up to presenting her customers with a platter full of smoke. Robin is more like Remy in Ratatouille — the master of good, honest peasant food.

So the good guys, the bad guys, and the dweebs in the movie all share the same obsessive focus on eating. But to me, they’re all silly, and I didn’t care about any of them. Neither the living-off-grid authenticity of savoring a truffle you just found in the woods nor the hushed Michelin-starred sanctum where they charge you $48 for a plate of (three) sea scallops appeals to me. Robin may be presented as a sort of holy man of food appreciation, but to me he just represents a different style of hype, just as Green Day markets itself differently than Celine Dion.