To Take His Face Off: A Dive Beneath the Wacky Nic Cage
Nicolas Cage is known for being over the top. For those who are less interested in film history, he’ll be remembered either for his action movies or from clips of his films that show him at the height of scenery-chewing camp. These small snippets of his career don’t really give a rounded picture of who he is as an actor, but they do represent how he has emotion and an energy that are distinctly Cageian, regardless of the movie. But what of the ideas, techniques and motivations beneath the memes? When looking at his near forty-year career, it is clear that Nicolas Cage is all about humanity. You could even dub him an “everyman”…
Longlegs has recently seemed to cement the myth that has built up around Cage about his acting style being all about extremity. The 2024 movie has been an unexpected success in grossing over $100million at the worldwide box office, meaning that many who’ve been away from his work will be witnessing him topping the extremes he has reached over the years. His character is a serial killer: bloated, pale, unkempt, and looking very much unlike himself. He swaps between whispery creepiness and singing turned chaotic screeching. There might be something meaningful beneath this performance, but the script doesn’t give the character enough room to be more than, as expected, exceptionally well-acted.
Buying into the myth of Cage is easy, especially to the majority who grew up through the 1990s or even more recently. Many filmgoers grew up on the thrill rides of Face/Off and Con Air – before barrelling into the 2000s absurdity of Ghost Rider and The Wicker Man. This is not to proclaim that there aren’t good things within those films, and Face/Off especially has Cage utterly believable in its unusual face-swapping scenario. However, seeing that selection as the peak of his output misses the fact that he is an actor who seems to have excelled in most genres, and across a wide spectrum of character archetypes. As such, the people debating whether he’s a great actor may have forgotten or don’t know that he won Best Actor at the Oscars for Leaving Las Vegas, released just two years prior to the more memeable work referenced above (1995).
The best example of Cage being very much unlike his reputation is in the film Joe (2014). He perfectly plays a man whose impulses are strenuously contained. It’s a film by David Gordon Green who, like his lead, is a creative whose unlikely career swerves have changed his reputation. Most nowadays will know him for bro comedy Pineapple Express or the highly divisive new Halloween trilogy. An interesting point in the latter, however, is its attempt to humanise its characters beyond the remits of a slasher flick. That empathy, compassion, and unexpected depth unites both Cage and Gordon Green in their careers, and in their partnership working on Joe. Unlike the over-the-top work of Face/Off, Con Air, or indeed Longlegs, this introspective film that focused on a deeply wounded and morally compromised man was too subdued to reach mass audiences.
Joe seems almost perpetually devoid of joy. He spends most of his time in the solitude of his home, leading a group of loggers, or drinking away his emotions at a bar. Often-times he’ll be drinking by the wheel and, in extreme stress, committing violence or causing mayhem in a brothel. He’s a character who might be ordinarily difficult to care for given this unappealing mix of characterisations. Cage, however, gives this character layers. He’s a man who seems perpetually haunted, his pleasant work manner papering over a lack of humour or happiness. This persistent weight is put onto the character with something of a light touch, making for a powerful effect when he becomes a riotous drunk or possessed by fury. We are left with a clear portrayal of a man exhausted by his nature, and this ability to believe in the character leaves a sense of the awfulness of such a state. Rather than being distracted by histrionics or melodrama, Cage’s performance encourages us to ask how society might stop such suffering and wasted potential.
The latter half of the 2000s and start of the 2010s had seen Cage star in a series of critically panned flicks, famously in order to deal with a mountain of debt. The likes of Mandy, released in 2018, started what has been perceived as a renaissance, though it is easy to be drawn to the promotional image of the blood-soaked Cage, and the well-reported scene of a chainsaw battle. A synopsis of Pig similarly riffs on Nic Cage, action hero, positioning it as a John Wick revenge flick, but it is – more obviously than Mandy’s intense heart – tale of intense grief. It’s a work that would blindside and perhaps disappoint action hungry viewers.
Pig (2021) is a film that is a surely more divisive work, but perhaps is the apex of the actor balancing his different sides. Cage regards Pig as the film he’s most proud of, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a film that has deeply humanistic values, but also brings to bear his underappreciated talent for emotional honesty. It’s a talent that is visible, for instance, in a film like Moonstruck (1987). He might be known by the internet for his chaotic, semi-suicidal diatribe – but that’s to ignore that his emotions also power deeply romantic moments. Moonstruck may indeed be a very different film to Pig, yet his emotional intensity is similarly central to its key scenes.
The obvious scene in Pig is the restaurant scene, which without a doubt is the film’s most iconic. It’s where the film most obviously signals that it isn’t going to become the revenge movie that people expect. Cage’s character, Robin, is deeply agitated and out of place as he encounters an old colleague, and this tension suggests a coming moment when everything devolves into bloody violence. This is the scene, however, when everything softens instead, with Robin shifting into empathy for this colleague – someone deeply flustered who has lost their way in a corporate world. As the one-time underling is stunned by this switch, so are we. It draws rapt attention to the care and grief behind the movie’s key line, “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about”.
Of course, with earnest performances people could believe that perhaps Cage is simply playing himself, the person behind the layers of frivolity. But this ignores how his performances would never work if he was just swapping between different parts of himself from film to film or era to era. His role as an alcohol dependent in Leaving Las Vegas highlights this, being one of the hardest challenges any actor could take on. The character is almost permanently, severely, and clearly outwardly drunk. No one else could surely have the range to capture the facets to make this work without it becoming cartoonish. Cage plays a man outwardly unsteady, one torn between leaning into drunkenness and attempting a sober façade; a smiling person an inch away from tears and rage.
But the performance is not just reliant on technical achievement, there’s an ethos behind it. There was, for a start, a tremendous amount of research done in order to accurately portray the character. This involved some binge drinking, but largely the serious studying of other actors in similar roles over the years. This also involved an attempt to understand the psyche of a man being torn apart, and to portray the tragedy and humanity of this. As a result, Leaving Las Vegas profoundly shows the terrible toll that dependency takes on individuals who, no matter who they are, deserve better.
You could even take a nuanced reading of Longlegs’ title character beneath the histrionics. This serial killer isn’t given much in the way of motivation, but there are hints to go on from the simultaneously sinister and compelling way he moves about the world. His voice is high and childlike, matching with odd arm movements and swerves into singing and screeching. Midway through the film comes the most memeable moment and perhaps the key to it, as he barrels down the road yelling “Daddy! Mommy! Unmake me! And save me from the hell of living!” All of these puzzle pieces hint at a killer projecting his own trauma – and, at the very least, the bombastic behaviour is more striking than a trope-laden backstory reveal.
It should be abundantly clear that there is consistent intention in all these roles. It’s the case that viewers might think they are laughing at a film when the actors are too. Moonstruck is the perfect example, not least in its undoubtedly explosive casting of Cher and Cage in the lead roles. The latter plays a baker named Ronny, the future brother-in-law of Loretta (Cher), and his first screen appearance is the height of absurdity. He mourns the loss of his hand in an industrial accident, holding it aloft with Shakespearean melodrama and asking for a big knife to cut his own throat. There’s no way this was designed to be anything less than over the top, and yet such scenes are treated like mistakes.
The film is perfectly calibrated throughout as a tribute to Italian-American culture. Cage’s frequent histrionics are a tongue-in-cheek testament to fiery melodrama, as the numerous appreciative comments on the myriad of YouTube clips attest. But it’s a testament to the equally heightened passion of romance, and few actors would have the balance of earnestness and wild enthusiasm to so convincingly and non-creepily utter the line “I want you to come upstairs and get in my bed!” Watching and falling in love with Moonstruck is a reminder that there is one thing right about the myth of Nic Cage: he’s always an immense joy to watch.
Almost forty years have passed since the film’s release, and so it will be easy for many viewers to forget what a slice of beautiful movie magic it was. The biggest achievement was a Best Actress Academy Award win for Cher, who certainly deserved it thanks to the kind of magnetic screen presence that is rarely ever seen. It was a widely beloved film overall for its balance of humour and romance, and in today’s context feels like a much-welcomed follow up to the style of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1960). In Cage, it highlights an energetic and unique talent who can be as chaotic as he can be deeply romantic. It’s an early indication of the genre-hopping brilliance of the rest of Cage’s career.
With such performances in mind, it seems that the internet is the biggest obstacle in the way of Nicolas Cage getting his due. Social media platforms thrive on the bite-sized clips of Nic performing in his “Cageiest” way, and as they proliferate they create a public image of him as an actor without subtlety. It’s hard to know, though, how much of an issue it would be if films like Joe, Pig, Leaving Las Vegas, and Moonstruck, were more readily available. Streaming services today, however, encourage people to follow the front page – and for many that makes discovering more niche works less likely than ever. Big business does a fantastic career no favours, nor serves a public who would get much more from seeing the breadth of work an actor like Nicolas Cage has established across five decades.
For those who decide to dive into this forty-year back catalogue, however, there are masterful works of so many stripes. It is undeniable that there has been a short period of missteps, yet there has also been so much variety – with action-adventures, thrillers, searing dramas, profoundly philosophical works, and almost everything in-between. Nicolas Cage’s career is one that shows an actor who has tried at every turn to select the most interesting projects possible. For those willing to explore, the result is a body of work that is captivating, mind bending, and deeply human.
Written by Ceridwen Millington
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