The Travolta/Cage Project #80 Lord of War (2005)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Deep into the epic journey of discovery and delight that is Travolta/Cage and the Travolta/Cage Project I am depressed and dispirited by the sheer awfulness of John Travolta’s filmography.
John Travolta’s movies are too bad for me, Nathan Rabin, someone who has made a career out of lustily embracing the egregiously awful.
Yet even a true trash connoisseur like myself is occasionally tempted to tap out, to concede to my readers and podcast listeners, the universe and God Herself that I am utterly defeated by the staggering ineptitude of Travolta’s movies post-Face/Off and am officially throwing in the towel.
I’m not going to do that because I am a stubborn bastard but in my weakest moments I am tempted to want to not spend literally years watching uniformly bad movies starring John Travolta.
I have had an antithetical experience, thankfully, with the films of Nicolas Cage. Like Travolta, Cage is synonymous with bad movies and professional desperation. Yet compared to Travolta, Cage is a quality control king, an unassailable apogee of consistency.
I knew that Nicolas Cage had made some films of note after winning the Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas and perfecting the art of film with 1997’s Face/Off. But I didn’t realize what an incredible run Cage experienced in the decade following his Oscar triumph.
Between 1995 and 2005 Cage starred in Leaving Las Vegas, Kiss of Death, The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, City of Angels, Snake Eyes, Bringing Out the Dead, Gone in 60 Seconds, Adaptation, Matchstick Men, National Treasure, Lord of War and The Weather Man.
Those aren’t all out and out triumphs but they’re all entertaining and engaging and a good number of the aforementioned Cage vehicles are legit modern day classics.
If the decade that followed paled in comparison that's because compared to that extraordinary run, just about everything does. Cage made some stinkers during that time as well, duds like 8MM, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Sonny but they were the exception rather than the rule.
Like The Weather Man, Cage’s other 2015 movie Lord of War is an audacious 1970s satire that somehow got made and released in the middle of the aughts.
I was legitimately shocked to discover that Lord of War did decent business at the box-office because it is the rare Hollywood studio film with seemingly zero concern for commercial considerations.
It’s hard to believe Lord of War even got made in the first place because it flagrantly and defiantly violates so many of the rules of commercial American filmmaking, particularly the ones involving keeping narration to a minimum and always making sure that audiences will root for likable, sympathetic main characters.
Lord of War is mostly narration. On that level, it sometimes resembles a cinematic essay as much as a conventional narrative film. And it’d be hard to imagine a less sympathetic hero for a big budget American studio film than a Ukrainian immigrant who makes a fortune as an international arms dealer, the kind who gives armies of African child soldiers the high powered weaponry necessary for war.
Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, the aforementioned international international arms dealer, as a savvy operator who more or less stumbles backwards into the world of selling weapons and discovers that he has a real gift for the business.
Like the self-obsessed neurotic he played in The Weather Man, Yuri is defined by a job that defines him as a human being. But where The Weather Man depicted its protagonist’s job as impossibly easy, the life of an arms dealer is presented as absurdly difficult to the point of being impossible.
Beyond the ever-present danger involved, Yuri has to deal with a million different tricky variables as he jet-sets across the globe making sure the war-mongers of the world have everything they need.
Yuri is initially assisted and eventually hindered in this bloody business by his younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto), a self-destructive fuck-up with an insatiable hunger for cocaine who is forever going in and out of rehab.
Lord of War tracks its amoral anti-hero’s rise from obscurity as he takes advantage of the seismic shift that was the end of the Cold War, a game changer that forever altered the balance of international power.
The end of the Cold War is the best thing that could happen to an independent arms dealer but Yuri also benefits from bloodshed in Africa. As long as people are killing other people and bloody, brutal, interminable wars are being fought business will be booming for merchants of death like our anti-hero.
Despite his elaborate justification for his peculiar and unfortunate line of work what Yuri does in ultimately unconscionable and unforgivable. He single-handedly makes the world a worse, most dangerous place but like all bad businessmen, he consoles himself with the possibly true notion that if he wasn’t occupying that particular place in the international arms trade someone else would.
Like The Weather Man, Lord of War takes us deep inside the frazzled psyche of its protagonist and narrator. We see this dark, murderous, inherently amoral world through his eyes, his words and his excuses. Yet because Yuri is played by an incredibly likable movie star and is the main character of a movie he ends up being far more sympathetic than he has any right to be.
Lord of War is a tricky movie in terms of race and gender in that pretty much every black character in it is a warlord or a child soldier and the women are explicitly portrayed as sex objects.
There’s a brutal moment late in the film when a charismatic, brutal African warlord sends a pair of beautiful women to Yuri’s hotel to have sex with him as a gift and his extra-marital lust is tampered by his awareness of just how prevalent AIDS is in the region.
Yuri’s soul and spirit have been irrevocably warped by his deadly trade but also by the ugliness and ruthless self-interest of capitalism. He sees everything as a cold-hearted transaction, including his marriage to a gorgeous trophy wife played by Bridget Moynahan.
If Lord of War thought its protagonist was heroic on any level it would open itself up to charges of racism and sexism but it rightly sees him as a monster who embodies the cynical greed of colonialism and capitalism when untethered to even the foggiest sense of morality and ethics.
Lord of War is a dark and despairing film about a lost man trying to justify his unjustifiable existence and profession to himself as much as the audience and the world at large. I’m not sure it would have worked without an actor of Cage’s talent and presence at its core.
Cage’s complex, multi-dimensional turn allows us to feel for this horrible man and his plight but the movie is clear-eyed in its condemnation of him and his world.
Lord of War marked an appropriately auspicious end to a remarkable decade for one of the greatest actors ever to grace the silver screen.
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