The Travolta/Cage Project #72 Matchstick Men (2003)
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
In Ridley Scott’s sun-dappled con man drama Matchstick Men Nicolas Cage plays a role very similar to at least one of the roles he played in his previous film, Adaptation.
In Matchstick Men, as in Adaptation, Cage gets deep inside the clammy skin and frazzled psyche of a self-loathing introvert who is uniquely gifted at his profession but utterly lost when it comes to just about everything else.
In both of these stunning, Oscar-worthy performances, Cage is absolutely brilliant as a broken, emotionally shattered man who must escape the prison of self and connect with other human beings on a profound spiritual level in order to find a reprieve from agonizing, unbearable loneliness.
In Adaptation, the loner Cage played was a fictionalized version of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman as he marinates in self-doubt and free-floating misanthropy as he struggles to adapt Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief for the big screen.
Matchstick Men, meanwhile, casts Cage as Roy Waller, a veteran con artist with Tourette’s syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Waller was once an alcoholic in a toxic, failed marriage but he has since cleaned up his life to the point where there’s nothing in it beyond sadness and regret.
The personification of human misery’s home is like his haunted psyche: spotless, spare and utterly devoid of anything resembling warmth, happiness or human connection.
Roy’s life is his job because it affords him an opportunity to briefly become other people he hates less than her hates himself. He's so averse to commitment that he’s limited himself and partner Frank Mercer (Sam Rockwell) to short cons, sad little hustles targeting desperate, grubby little people rather than the billionaires and high rollers con artists usually go after in movies like this.
Then one day the grifter’s lonely life changes when he discovers that he is the father of Angela (Alison Lohman, in a masterful star-making turn that frustratingly failed to make her a star), a spunky fourteen year old tomboy.
Lohman looks disconcertingly like Cage. It is very easy to believe that they could share DNA and much else. That’s important, since Matchstick Men requires considerable suspension of disbelief and a high tolerance for the ubiquitous conventions of movies about con artists.
As in 8mm, Matchstick Men casts Cage as someone whose profession as a hardboiled veteran gumshoe and longtime con artist respectively, would suggest a certain level of cynicism, skepticism and world-weariness that they most assuredly do not possess.
Instead, both men are strangely naive, gullible and easily deceived/shocked in ways that can be hard to believe but in the case of Roy at least ring true to life.
Matchstick Men was certainly not the first movie to cast Nicolas Cage as a father but in many ways it represents the beginning of the Dad Stage of Cage’s career. That’s because Matchstick Men is very much about a lost man learning how to be a father nearly a decade and a half after his ostensible offspring’s birth.
Matchstick Men is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie with a twist in that it’s about a sad, lonely man whose life is utterly transformed by the arrival of a quirky, chatterbox young woman who reconnects him with his long-lost lust for life.
The difference is that the woman in this case is not a girlfriend but rather a daughter. The effect is the same however. Roy falls hopelessly in love with being a father. He is besotted with the responsibilities that come with parenthood.
Roy may not realize it when Angela shows up at his front door, looking for a dad and an escape from an unhappy home life, but he desperately wants to be a father. It goes beyond that: he needs to have someone in his life that he can take care of the same way that he himself needs to be taken care of, to be loved and accepted and validated.
That’s the essence of the con. You give the mark something that they desperately want as a way of distracting them from your true aims. In this case that’s a chance for Roy to become a family man like Nicolas Cage in the alternate reality sequences in The Family Man as opposed to Nicolas Cage at the beginning of the motion picture The Family Man.
I haven’t seen Matchstick Men since I reviewed it very positively at the time of its release so I was curious as to how it would hold up now that I knew a climactic twist that, in hindsight, shouldn’t particularly surprise anyone, nor count as much of a twist. I am pleased to report that the movie was just as satisfying upon a second viewing because while it benefits from the twist it is ultimately not reliant upon it.
There are really only three or so plots for movies about con artists. The first, and most ubiquitous, involves con artists getting conned in the process of trying to con their marks. What a twist! What a switcheroo! What an utterly predictable direction to take material like this!
What makes Matchstick Men work emotionally is that Roy very much wants to be conned. He needs to be conned. His urgent desire to find another human being to save him from drowning in a vast ocean of suicidal despair makes the flam-flam man the perfect mark.
Ridley Scott and screenwriters Ted and Nicholas Griffin immerse us in the swampy psyche of the film’s tortured protagonist. We see the action from his limited, narrow perspective so we end up getting conned along with him.
There’s something inherently meta about movie about con artists because cons often feel like little movies, elaborate fictions with scripts and roles and players designed to solicit specific emotions in the mark.
It’s a testament to how much I enjoyed Matchstick Men that I wish it was a half hour longer and found room for more cons. Like all movies Matchstick Men would benefit tremendously from more Sam Rockwell.
Rockwell is, as always, a goddamn delight and his chemistry with Cage is predictably explosive. They’re two very different men. One is goofy, energetic and overflowing with child-like energy and excitement. The other is a man of constant sorrow yet they form a successful partnership all the same until the true nature of their relationship is exposed.
Lohman’s tricky, multi-layered and quietly miraculous performance as a likable young woman who isn’t at all what she at first seems to be seemed to promise great things from the unknown actresses that have not, alas, come to pass but it's hard to overstate the brilliance of her all-important turn here.
If we are not deceived along with our eminently flawed but deeply honorable anti-hero then Matchstick Men fundamentally does not work. In that respect Lohman has the hardest and most challenging role in a film full of them. It’s a role she absolutely nails.
Getting conned ends up being just about the best thing that could possibly happen to Roy. I similarly enjoyed being conned even when I knew the nature of the hustle and the seemingly inevitable identity of the film’s true mark.
Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are EIGHT so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
and of course you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace