Caged Pig

Some movies are real crowd-pleasers that appeal to a broad audience (and, typically, are specifically crafted to do so). Then there are movies that are real barometers of a person's personal taste in film -- the kind of thing that one person thinks are Oscar worthy and another finds unwatchable. Pig is one of those movies.

Nicolas Cage stars as Robin Feld, a reclusive truffle hunter who lives in the Oregon forest. When his beloved foraging pig is abducted, he recruits the help of the restaurant supplier who buys from him. Together, the two try to find who took the pig.

Pig was nominated for absolutely no Academy Awards, even though a great many critics put it on their Top 10 Lists for 2021. I know at least one person who has called Pig their favorite movie of last year. So for the right audience, this movie definitely works. I'm simply not in that audience.

To some extent, I can blame the way I bounced off this movie on the way that some people tried to summarize it: "it's John Wick with a pig." That flippant description does a disservice to people who like either movie. This is not an action-adventure, nor a revenge flick; it's a largely internal meditation on loss.

But it being so internalized is the bigger part of why I think it didn't work well for me. I like emotions to ride closer to the surface in a movie. Being at a remove feels very much the point here to me; the protagonist himself has withdrawn from society, so the storytelling chooses to withdraw from direct emotion. Instead, feelings will be evoked through the secondary medium of food. (That makes sense in context, believe it or not.) You'll be invited to pity a character, but not to actually feel what the character is feeling.

It's beyond wild to me that Nicolas Cage is the star of this movie. His career is littered with over-the-top, larger-than-life performances. Casting him to be a character who's staid and restrained feels like some bizarre sort of dare. His very presence does even more disservice to proper expectation setting, I think, than the people who called this "John Wick with a pig." You spend the entire movie waiting for Nicolas Cage to start... you know... Caging. But he never does. This is like some darker, grittier, more "realistic" version of a bright and colorful superhero who we've never actually seen on screen before: The Dark Chef Rises.

My instincts told me this movie wasn't going to be for me, but I let enough high praise convince me to try it anyway. I really should have trusted my instincts on this one. For me, Pig was a D- at best, with perhaps the kindest thing I could say about it being that it took only 92 minutes of my time. I don't doubt the sincerity of those who put it among the best of 2021. I just don't get it.