You Don't Have to Watch All of Nicolas Cage's Movies to Love The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent But It Sure Doesn't Hurt!!
I have devoted my career to the notion that the more you put into something, the more you get out of it. That’s why I have devoted fifteen years to documenting the history of cinematic failure for first My Year of Flops and then My World of Flops.
To paraphrase Prince, there is joy in repetition. That’s why I’ve been to forty-something Phish shows and plan to go to at least forty more before I’m through.
It’s why I decided to spend joyful years writing a book about every last song on every single “Weird Al” Yankovic album and why I thought it would be a worthwhile endeavor to cover every John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in podcast and online column form.
At the risk of being immodest, as someone who has written between 3 and 5 books about “Weird Al” Yankovic, I probably enjoy his concerts more than folks who haven’t written even a single book about the man.
Most recently, I have decided to write, in the upcoming Fractured Mirror book, a reference guide to (you guessed it) EVERY American movie about the film industry. Every last one. Is that even possible? I’m not entirely sure but I hope so!
Today marks the final day of the Kickstarter campaign for The Fractured Mirror book and I wanted to go out with a bang so I chose to cross-pollinate my obsessions and write about a movie I will be covering for both The Fractured Mirror and the eventual Travolta/Cage book.
It brings me great joy to report that today I went to a movie theater and saw the new Nicolas Cage movie.
That’s wonderful for many reasons but the two primary ones are
It’s legal and safe to go to the movie theaters again
Nicolas Cage is starring in a new theatrically released motion picture
You do not need to have devoted years of your life to obsessively celebrating the totality of Cage’s career to like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent but it doesn’t hurt!
I am the ideal audience for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: someone who has devoted a sizable chunk of his career to arguing that Nicolas Cage is a peerless genius and is about to embark on a year-long journey to write about every American movie about American movies.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has inspired a culture-wide celebration of Nicolas Cage as an actor, movie star and pop icon that, honestly, warms the cockles of my heart and makes me EXTREMELY happy.
Because this Nicolas Cage guy, he means a lot to me! In its own goofball fashion, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is about the intense emotional and spiritual connection we feel with our favorite artists.
Watching the post-modern crowd-pleaser I realized that part of the reason I feel such a bond with Cage is because he is famously terrible with money and fell into an endless ocean of debt despite being a huge box-office attraction for decades and I’ve fought the demon of debt my entire adult life, mostly unsuccessfully.
As brilliant and accomplished as Cage might be, he nevertheless seems to be just barely holding on. He perpetually seems to be on the verge of losing it, of giving into madness or despair or self-pity.
This very public vulnerability, as well as his equally public debt, makes it surprisingly easy to relate to him emotionally despite him being a genius, a celebrity and someone blessed and cursed with more than a touch of divine madness.
In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself as a poet and a fool, a great artist and a ridiculous human being. It’s a movie and a performance that implicitly asks who Nicolas Cage is and what he means in 2022.
In a Black Mirror meets Charlie Kaufman development, at some point in the last fifteen years, Nicolas Cage went from being an actor and a movie star to being a living meme. The internet has worked its weird, self-indulgent magic on Cage and transformed him into an endless series of memes and gifs and gag gifts and all other manner of online ephemera.
The Nicolas Cage of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is Nicolas Cage the Sentient Meme on some level. It’s deeply invested in the actor’s cult of personality as our nation’s favorite lunatic, a holy mad man whose insanity makes him lovable rather than off-putting.
As The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent opens, Cage’s career has been in a downward spiral for a long time. His fanboys may think Cage is a god but his daughter just barely tolerates him and his wife can’t hide her disappointment in him as a partner, father or human being.
The industry, meanwhile, sees Cage as something of a joke, a laughingstock who was once at the tippy top of the A-list but suffered a precipitous fall from grace due to poor decisions, bad movies and an unfortunate predilection for squandering his vast fortune on castles and dinosaur bones.
I went into The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent as blind as possible. I didn’t watch any of the trailers. I didn’t read plot descriptions. Hell, I tried not to even look at posters. The only preparation that I did for it involved decades of Nicolas Cage super-fandom and a more recent stint as a Nicolas Cage historian/podcaster.
That ended up being the best possible preparation. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is nothing if not a loving valentine to Cage and the world that he has created in his movies and personal life.
As someone with strong feelings about Guarding Tess I loved the way the movie pandered to me and my Nicolas Cage-fixated sensibility. I loved every Captain Corelli’s Mandolin reference.
Throughout The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent I felt seen and understood. That is a wonderful feeling.
It’s also a feeling that the fictional Cage begins the film no longer knowing. His career is in the dumps. He can’t get the roles he wants and is viewed as a desperate has been chasing past glory.
So when he’s offered a million dollars to hang out at the birthday party of powerful, connected Spanish fan and aspiring screenwriter Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal) he reluctantly acquiesces because he needs the money but also the attention and positive validation.
Cage is larger than life. He has a persona so vast and endlessly fascinating that it can support a movie at once casually ambitious and a bit of a lark but The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a feature-length exercise in inspired self-parody.
That means taking someone who is already extreme, intense and ridiculous and making him ten times more preposterous. Cage is a very funny actor, most of the time deliberately, but he’s not a funnyman or a comic actor in any sense so it’s interesting seeing him navigate waters at once cozily familiar and bracingly new.
The CIA is convinced Javi is a bad man who has taken a girl hostage so it recruits the actor into working on their behalf. The Academy Award winner consequently finds himself torn between his budding friendship with the earnest younger fan and a desire to be a hero in real life and not just an endless series of seemingly interchangeable direct-to-streaming movies.
Pascal is boyishly likable and has great chemistry with Cage while retaining an air of danger fitting for someone suspected of being a monster. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent works best as a buddy comedy about two very different men bonding in paradise.
The filmmakers love and understand their star/main character but not to the point that they don’t score big laughs at his expense. Cage delivers a bravura turn devoid of vanity or ego. He’s a giddy, gleeful caricature, all id and ego and movie star pretension. But there’s also an unmistakable sadness underneath.
The overarching conceit of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is to stick a late-period Nicolas Cage into a late-period Cage movie as himself and while the action movie spoofery is not as inspired as the show-business commentary it’s pure pleasure all the same, even if you do not have a love of Cage that borders on unhealthy, the way I do.
Loving The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent made me even more excited to be devoting a massive amount of time and energy to exploring the crazy world of American movies about American movies.
I can’t wait to continue the journey.
Won’t you join me?
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