The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent

The Discreet Charm
Of Being Nic Cage

The Unbearable Weight
Of Massive Talent
USA 2022
Directed by Tom Gormican
Lionsgate

Warning: Unbearable amount of massive spoilerage.

You know, despite my initial, allergic reactions to the actor in the 1980s and 1990s (well, apart from his essential performance in Wild At Heart, obviously), I‘ve grown to appreciate and enjoy the work of Nicolas Cage much more over the last 15 years or so and he’s definitely been on fire for the last few years, with outrageously flamboyant roles in stuff like Mandy (reviewed here), Colour Out Of Space (reviewed here) and Willy’s Wonderland (reviewed here) coming out alongside movies like Pig (reviewed here), undoubtedly one of the greatest movies of recent years. Even so, when a movie paraphrases the title of a famous Milan Kundera novel (and subsequent movie adaptation) like The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and promotes Nicolas Cage playing a version of himself, even I am going to get warning signs that maybe this might not be such a great idea.

That being said, though, I’d have to say that The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent is something of a minor masterpiece of modern, self referential cinema and I was really surprised that they managed to get to something both as polished and as witty as this into cinemas.

The plot sees Nicolas Cage on the rocks in terms of getting decent new roles and having problems with his daughter (due to his ego mainly) and his ex-wife. Then he gets a call and he goes to Spain to be at the birthday of ‘super fan’ Javi, played by Pedro Pascal... a gig which he takes for the money but, surprisingly, he hits it off with him and the two develop a bond. However, the CIA assume that Javi, who is perceived as the local drug cartel kingpin, has kidnapped the local president’s daughter and so they employ Cage to try and help them rescue her and stop Javi. Things aren’t quite as simple though and various humorous shenanigans follow as the reality of the situation is made clear and it’s finally down to Cage, his ex-wife and Javi to rescue both the president’s daughter and Cage’s own daughter, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, from the real kingpin.

And it’s great.

It’s got a nice sense of pacing and atmosphere in different sections of the movie too, where it goes from a comedic look at the nature of art and the way it affects the players behind and in front of the screen in Holllywoodland, switching to a male bonding comedy before going into full on action comedy mode for the last half hour.

And it’s full of cool moments (such as when Cage is in conversation or even assaulted by himself in a younger guise in his imagination, at various points) to great throwaway lines such as the fact his daughter thought Humphrey Bogart was a porn star. There’s even a crazy LSD sequence where Cage and Pascal do the old comedy warhorse of two people trying to escape and get over a wall when, in reality, they could have just quickly walked around it... and they actually get away with it and pull it off because the two actors have great on-screen chemistry. Which is nice... yeah, these two should do another couple of movies together.

My favourite moment is when Cage asks Javi what his three favourite films are and he comes up with Face Off (not one of my favourites), The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari (should be one of everyone’s favourites, surely?) and, the movie which forever changed his life and made him want to be a better person... Paddington 2 (reviewed here). And right there, is why this film is so brilliant, as Cage ridicules him but then is made to watch it and realises that it’s a truly great movie... the big comedy sparks which, although blatantly ridiculous, also hide a pearl of truth within the idea. Because, after all, Paddington 2 is a pretty moving movie (perhaps not quite as cool as the first one but it’s a close call, for sure).

However, comedy acting, intelligent dialogue and sheer entertainment value aside, the film is also amazingly well put together. The director does that thing where he uses sets and various things to reflect a verticality to split the shots into delineated sections but, also combines that with a camera point of view that kind of moves you towards that kind of composition. So you approach something from the side and then suddenly you are in a perfectly beautiful looking, symmetrical shot set up. He even has the vehicle that Cage and Javi are driving at one point as an open top car with big vertical sides leading to where a canopy might go over, so he can even expand that vertical aesthetic into the high speed car chase scenes too... it’s blindingly good stuff, I have to say.

I know Cage turned this movie down a good three or four times before finally being persuaded to accept playing himself in The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent and I can certainly see why he would have been reluctant to send himself up... or rather the perceived and totally false, off screen hyper-personae which he represents to many of his fans (I’m sure)... but I’m really glad Cage finally caved on that decision because I think this one is about as well handled a version of that exploration as there could be and, yeah, it’s overwhelmingly entertaining throughout its full running time, even if you are somewhat ahead of the plot on occasion (don’t expect too many surprises... it’s not that kind of film). I’m definitely glad I saw this and will certainly revisit it at some point.