PIG
****
Director: Michael Sarnoski
Screenwriters: Michael Sarnoski and Vanessa Block
Principal cast:
Nicolas Cage
'Brandy'
Alex Wolff
Adam Arkin
Cassandra Violet
Darius Pierce
Country: UK
Classification: MA15+
Runtime: 92 mins.
Australian release date: 16 September 2021.
Anyone familiar with Nic Cage's recent work, and here I am thinking of movies like Mandy, Colour Out of Space and Prisoners of the Ghostland, would expect that his latest film, Pig, would be in much the same vein (especially with that title)! Far from the scenery chewing performances he's offered in those genre flicks, in Michael Sarnoski's Pig, the great actor has toned it right down. He recently told Variety that, "I just wanted to show up on set, walk into a room and carry whatever my life experiences, whatever my memories were, whatever my bad dreams last night were, and just tell the story... When I was making Jerry Bruckheimer movies back-to-back, that was just a high-pressure game. There were a lot of fun moments, but at the same time, there was also 'We wrote this line. It has to be said this way.' ... On independent movies, you have more freedom to experiment and be fluid. There’s less pressure and there’s more oxygen in the room."
In Pig, Cage is Robin Feld, a hatted chef who ran an acclaimed restaurant in Portland, Oregon, before dropping out at the height of his career - for reasons that are never clearly explained. He's been living alone in the wilderness since then, for 15 years, his only company a truffle-sniffing pig called... well, Pig (played by the very cute 'Brandy'). The pair are visited only by Amir (Alex Wolff), a buyer for restaurants, who comes by the shack once a week to purchase Rob's excellent truffles for his city clients. This simple life is rudely interrupted when Rob is bush-whacked one night and Pig is stolen, forcing the grief-stricken chef to return to Portland. Now, based on Cage's recent oeuvre, it's at this point you'd be thinking, "Here we go, the guns are going to come out and the blood is going to flow," but you'd be in for a surprise if you did. As I said at the outset of this review, Pig is not your usual Nic Cage film, and Sarnoski and Vanessa Block's screenplay takes us into uncharted, though not unsatisfying, territory.
Cage does still look like he's back in Mandy territory because he's unshaven, his hair is unwashed and long, and you can almost smell him. You can see why he and the pig are best friends, even if Pig appears to be the less unkempt of the two. That's where any similarity ends, however and, as the film proceeds, it begins to look more like the recent gentle documentary The Truffle Hunters, albeit with a dystopian edge. What this unusual film is really about is learning to live with loss. That's part of the reason why Rob dropped out of the restaurant scene in the first place, having realised that, "It's not real. None of it is real. The critics. The customers.” It's also, I suspect, part of the reason why Nic Cage took on this strange, but tasty, dish.
Screenwriters: Michael Sarnoski and Vanessa Block
Principal cast:
Nicolas Cage
'Brandy'
Alex Wolff
Adam Arkin
Cassandra Violet
Darius Pierce
Country: UK
Classification: MA15+
Runtime: 92 mins.
Australian release date: 16 September 2021.
Anyone familiar with Nic Cage's recent work, and here I am thinking of movies like Mandy, Colour Out of Space and Prisoners of the Ghostland, would expect that his latest film, Pig, would be in much the same vein (especially with that title)! Far from the scenery chewing performances he's offered in those genre flicks, in Michael Sarnoski's Pig, the great actor has toned it right down. He recently told Variety that, "I just wanted to show up on set, walk into a room and carry whatever my life experiences, whatever my memories were, whatever my bad dreams last night were, and just tell the story... When I was making Jerry Bruckheimer movies back-to-back, that was just a high-pressure game. There were a lot of fun moments, but at the same time, there was also 'We wrote this line. It has to be said this way.' ... On independent movies, you have more freedom to experiment and be fluid. There’s less pressure and there’s more oxygen in the room."
In Pig, Cage is Robin Feld, a hatted chef who ran an acclaimed restaurant in Portland, Oregon, before dropping out at the height of his career - for reasons that are never clearly explained. He's been living alone in the wilderness since then, for 15 years, his only company a truffle-sniffing pig called... well, Pig (played by the very cute 'Brandy'). The pair are visited only by Amir (Alex Wolff), a buyer for restaurants, who comes by the shack once a week to purchase Rob's excellent truffles for his city clients. This simple life is rudely interrupted when Rob is bush-whacked one night and Pig is stolen, forcing the grief-stricken chef to return to Portland. Now, based on Cage's recent oeuvre, it's at this point you'd be thinking, "Here we go, the guns are going to come out and the blood is going to flow," but you'd be in for a surprise if you did. As I said at the outset of this review, Pig is not your usual Nic Cage film, and Sarnoski and Vanessa Block's screenplay takes us into uncharted, though not unsatisfying, territory.
Cage does still look like he's back in Mandy territory because he's unshaven, his hair is unwashed and long, and you can almost smell him. You can see why he and the pig are best friends, even if Pig appears to be the less unkempt of the two. That's where any similarity ends, however and, as the film proceeds, it begins to look more like the recent gentle documentary The Truffle Hunters, albeit with a dystopian edge. What this unusual film is really about is learning to live with loss. That's part of the reason why Rob dropped out of the restaurant scene in the first place, having realised that, "It's not real. None of it is real. The critics. The customers.” It's also, I suspect, part of the reason why Nic Cage took on this strange, but tasty, dish.