The Travolta/Cage Project #52 City of Angels (1997)
It can be easy to forget that the sleeper hit that made Francis Ford Coppola’s smolderingly handsome nephew a movie star was not a heavyweight art film or raw independent film festival favorite but rather a charming romantic comedy loosely inspired by a snarky novelty song written by Frank Zappa.
1983’s Valley Girl, Cage’s breakthrough film, made inspired use of his offbeat charisma and brooding intensity but it was even more aggressive and effective in exploiting the young actor’s androgynous beauty and explosive, young Marlon Brando-level sexual magnetism.
In his radiant youth, Cage wasn’t just handsome: he was gorgeous. He was beautiful. He was stunning. Though Cage is not generally thought of as a romantic leading man he has done some extraordinary work in the field.
When the role called for it Cage could be scorchingly sexy (Valley Girl and 1990’s Wild at Heart), an eminently relatable everyman in love (1992’s Honeymoon in Vegas, 1994’s It Could Happen to You), so violently, psychotically romantic that it veers into madness (1989’s Moonstruck) and a literal angel from heaven willing to give up paradise and eternity for the sake of the right woman (1997’s City of Angels).
Cage spends City of Angels gazing thoughtfully and soulfully into the distance with an expression that suggests that he literally spends every waking moment contemplating the exquisite gift of life.
Like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Cage cuts a decidedly otherworldly figure here. He’s epic, iconic, larger than life. Like Bowie, it’s consequently easier to buy him as a space alien or the world’s most romantic angel than as a normal guy who works as a middle manager at Home Depot and has a sore back.
Angels are not like ordinary people. Then again, neither are movie stars, which is why Cage and Travolta were perfect for City of Angels and Michael respectively.
Cage delivers a performance of bold earnestness and brazen sincerity in City of Angels. It is a star turn utterly devoid of irony or self-awareness. Never, for a moment, does Cage let on that there’s anything the least bit silly or ridiculous about playing an emo angel in the City of Angels in a remake of a Wim Wenders arthouse classic from the director of Casper re-configured as a swooningly romantic vehicle for Meg Ryan, America’s Sweetheart.
After winning an Academy Award for playing a suicidal alcoholic in 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas and establishing himself as a bankable action star with the twisted trilogy of The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off Cage took another weird professional turn into romance novel territory with City of Angels, a hit remake of Wings of Desire with a Goo Goo Dolls soul.
Seth has spent millennia gently ushering the dead into the afterworld and giving vital, life-or-death assistance to poignantly mortal human beings when appropriate. The angel with the impossibly soulful eyes has it all but wants more.
Cage’s true romantic is no longer content to watch humanity from a safe distance. He wants to live, to experience the human ecstasy of sensation, to taste, to touch, to suck the sweet nectar out of life.
He wants to fall in love. And, like the protagonists of many a teen sex comedy, Seth wants to lose his virginity.
Seth’s seemingly idyllic existence changes forever when intense surgeon Dr. Maggie Rice (Meg Ryan) sees him despite not being on the precipice of death. The two strike up a curious flirtation that eventually veers into something much more.
Seth is unlike any man Maggie has ever known, on account of him not being a man at all, but rather a magical being literally sent from heaven to turn her frown upside down after she’s mega-bummed by the death of one of her patients on the operating table.
It’s love at first sight. For Seth, the passionate doctor embodies the poignant fragility and vulnerability of being mortal. She’s the closest thing to heaven that he’s ever seen, and yes I am borrowing the lyrics to “Iris” to describe the film’s plot and characters.
The always wonderful Dennis Franz similarly embodies the fragile beauty of mortality as Nathaniel Messinger, a former angel who gave it all up and chose to become human and mortal for the sake of love.
Franz brings much of the same warmth, humor and humanity to the role that Peter Falk did in Wings of Desire. Franz is a shameless scene-stealer as a supernatural being who is also, preposterously but delightfully, a regular guy.
Seth decides to take the plunge so, in a sequence eerily similar to the revered climax of Honeymoon in Vegas, he dramatically plunges from a great height for the sake of the gorgeous blonde pixie he’s madly in love with.
Seth becomes human and is promptly beaten up and robbed because that’s what humans do to other humans. But he doesn’t care! Because now he can finally eat a peach, for hours if so inclined, and weep tears of joy and pain and finally take his lady friend to a place angels and human beings alike know and revere as “The Bone Zone.”
Our heavenly hero tastes life’s fullness for the first but also last time. The couple’s happiness is short lived. The no longer depressed doctor is so blissed out after experiencing Seth’s skillful love-making that she doesn’t notice the truck speeding towards her bicycle and suffers a fatal collision.
It’s a darker, more tragic ending than Wings of Desire but even with this bummer of a conclusion, City of Angels is nevertheless weirdly weightless, a dreamy sigh of a movie that feels at times like the world’s longest, most expensive perfume commercial.
All I remembered about City of Angels from seeing it in the theaters when it came out was that Nicolas Cage had the most soulful eyes in the history of film and it made the Goo Goo Dolls song “Iris” ubiquitous.
It wasn’t until now that I realized just how ridiculously, even comically literal City of Angels is in its exploration of the film’s themes.
Here’s the thing: “Iris” is pure sap. Sugary as the day is long. As saccharine and hokey as they come. Yet within the context of City of Angels “Iris” succeeds spectacularly.
“Iris” captures the vibe of Siberling’s romantic fantasy so perfectly that it could pretty much accompany any scene in the film. Yet the song’s placement deep into its third act is key to its visceral impact because it so directly relates to Seth’s existential and metaphysical dilemma.
The only way lyrics like “And I'd give up forever to touch you/’Cause I know that you feel me somehow/You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be/And I don't want to go home right now” could be more on the nose would be if, Johnny Rzeznik sang, “I’m an angel played by Nic Cage/in love but I don’t want the world to see/in a Wings of Desire remake from the Casper guy with Dennis Franz from NYPD!”
In perhaps my single whitest moment, I got a little choked up listening to “Iris” in City of Angels. It worked for me in the same way the movie worked for me. If Siberling’s intention was to make an American Wings of Desire he failed miserably.
But Siberling didn’t set out to equal Wim Wenders, let alone top him. Instead he used the sturdy bones of an all-time classic as the foundation for a seductive romantic fantasy that could not be more shamelessly commercial or ridiculously mainstream.
On that level City of Angels is a success. It may be nothing more than an endless series of pretty pictures and intense emotions but its ethereal moodiness proves surprisingly irresistible.
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