PIG Review
With a simple yet somehow evocative title, the casting of a bedraggled Nicolas Cage in the lead role, and the story of a nature boy going after the people who stole his favorite pig, Michael Sarnoski’s PIG could be assumed to be anything but what it turns out to be. Just like its star, PIG persistently displays a bleeding and pleading heart under its off-kilter appearance, revealing a revenge plot that slowly turns into a quiet musing on grief and loss.
Separated into multiple chapters (which are thematically labeled as food courses) we find Cage’s character, a grizzled truffle farmer named Rob, moseying around in the lush Oregonian forests. For all his infamously over the top vocal tics and facial mannerisms found in some of his more recent works, Cage has always had the talent to subdue those overwhelming modes to portray all sorts of emotionally stunted or confined men and with PIG, the actor refreshingly steps back into those beats here. A man now content to live alone (sans the company of his large pig), Rob simply hunts truffles for his dapper client, Amir (Alex Wolff), and goes back to his humble cabin and drenches himself in the voice recordings of some woman from a past far away from his present. Clearly, even away from the clutches of civilization and in the throes of the quiet forest, Rob can’t quite shake something from a past he tries but fails to keep buried in himself. Even so, Rob finds some humble form of peace in his titular pig, who he warmly cozies up and converses with, which of course is shattered when his only companion is stolen in the night, leading Rob to recruit Amir to take him back into the city and track down his pig.
Throughout this journey, which takes the two men through the bowels of Portland’s food scene, PIG takes a plot that easily could’ve deviated into the hammy, disposable action flicks Cage usually pops up in and morphs it into something much more closer to a somber character study (not counting the occasional surreal touches like a sort of chef fight club the film quickly touches on). Sanorski, who wrote the script based off a story by him and Vanessa Block, pivots Rob’s revenge quest into a slow paced therapeutic healing session that slowly peels back the history of the film’s solitary protagonist. With each interaction with his chosen suspects and leads, Rob’s past slowly comes to light, revealing a man beset by tragedy and consequently overwhelmed by grief which Cage somberely unveils. Even Amir, who initially starts out as a stereotypical millienial shit-head (an aspect that Wolff can’t quite nail down without coming across like, well, a stereotype), embarks on his own emotional journey by reckoning with his own familial traumas (an aspect that Wolff is much more adept at displaying). PIG can’t quite fully escape from the sometimes hackneyed aspects of its story and low-key musings, found in a couple of scenes where Rob just decides to let off a morose monologue or do a random sad-sap activity such as visiting a random kid now living in his former home, but Sarnoski’s script nonetheless feels like a genuine attempt to dig a bit deeper into the image of a bearded and bloodied Nic Cage.
In this broken man, Cage dives into the prestige act of performing buried grief that slowly but surely bubbles to the surface. Even in the presence of some self-aggrandizing monologues, Cage, as he’s always done, commits to the character that he’s given, making every word of Rob’s musings ring true with the defeated air of a man ready to give up. In one particular standout scene that combines PIG’s unique mix of food biz satire and personal drama, Rob’s verbal deconstruction of a former employee of his — set in a typically bare but “chic” restaurant that calls to attention Rob’s perpetually bloodied figure — makes for a damned good Oscar reel, as Cage and Sarnoski bite into Rob’s disdain for an industry that now beats down genuineness in favor of catching the next food fad. While the following scenes never match the energy found in this scene, PIG finds its way to the shattering conclusion it was always going to end up at, allowing Cage and Sarnoski to leave the viewer with a hushed whisper of some form of closure.
PIG doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel when it comes to grief portrayed on screen — especially in its use of a cute animal acting as a sort of an emotional reservoir for our protagonist — but it adds enough little wrinkles to the formula to make it worth a viewing. It also brings Nicolas Cage back into his now rarely trodden areas of understated dramatic acting; an area that, if he so chooses, would be more than happy to welcome him back. I know I would.
3.5/5
