You live your life for them and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself. We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.
In this film, Nicolas Cage plays Robin, a guy who lives in the woods with his pig. They hunt truffles and sell them and because this pig is really something, the truffles Robin sells are in high demand back in the big city. In such high demand, in fact, that one day a couple of thugs steal Robin’s beloved pig and Robin journeys to the city, and into his past, in an effort to recover her. This is, at face value, a movie premise to die for. But, if you’re expecting some kind of gonzo, ultra-violent revenge flick, chek that expectation at the door, because Pig turns out to an incredibly moving meditation on sorrow, grief & loss.
Cage’s performance here is really incredible. To call it his best is to open the debate on the different varieties of performances Cage has given over the years, but what I’ll say is that it’s his most subtle and controlled performance maybe ever and it’s also perhaps his most emotionally nuanced and sensitive. He takes what might have easily been a grotesque character and imbues him with deep humanity, helped along by the excellent writing. The supporting cast is also really great. Alex Wolff, a young actor that really impressed me in Hereditary and My Friend Dahmer, is also playing a broad stereotype, an obnoxious yuppie, phone headset firmly in ear, motormouthed and materialistic; but as the film progresses he develops too and you start to see a pattern emerging. In this film, all the characters are kind of nursing secret sorrows. An actor named David Knell has what is essentially a one-scene part as a chef at a trendy deconstructionist restaurant, but he really knocks that scene out of the park. And Adam Arkin is fantastic as the film’s ultimate villain; the script gives even him inner pain to brood over and the final confrontation between Cage and Arkin is nothing like what I anticipated, a scene where you come away feeling heartbroken for both men.
The writing is just really on point. Like I’ve said, it develops even some of the minor supporting characters to the point that the feel real. This world, while heightened (hopefully, anyway), feels built all the way down to the ground, not a false front or a fake character in it. But even as it is a very character based script, it also explores a lot of very heavy themes in beautiful, melancholy ways: grief, loss, love, the past. The movie is ambivalent about a lot of things, its characters included. It seems to be saying that to return to the past is never a good idea; one returns to the past in search of what one has lost, but the past refuses to give up those things it has stolen and, in fact, it often exerts a toll, robbing the traveler of even the things they’d managed to hold on to. But if the past holds only sorrow, the future holds no hope. The film leans heavily into the notion of oncoming cataclysm, the notion that nothing really lasts very long and even the things that do will eventually fail to survive. Except, one supposes, Seattle. But **** Seattle.
And yet, though the film is deeply, profoundly sad, it isn’t a nihilistic movie in my opinion. It’s not entirely hopeless. I kind of struggled to even put my finger on why it isn’t actually. Just a straight retelling of the events or a cursory glance at the thematic points would seem to indicate that the movie would leave one feeling like one had been beaten down completely. And yet it doesn’t. Maybe part of the reason is that the film does have a dark sense of humor running through it. Just the notion of a previously hothand chef returning to the byzantine culinary underworld where he used to reign supreme is pretty funny as it is. There’s an amazing scene where a waitress goes through an incredible spiel that absolutely nails the whole “food as high art” movement at its most ridiculous and then Cage just deadpans, “I’d like to speak to the chef” and something about his delivery after the incredibly long and pretentious monologue that proceeded it really made me laugh. But that’s not the only reason the movie isn’t purely an exercise in miserabilism. There is still something here in the promise of human connection. This isn’t a movie about redemption, but it does find small moments of grace when people really do connect, sometimes with raw honesty about themselves and sometimes, maybe even more movingly, through food. Those connections and the possibility of them isn’t exactly enough to outweigh all the sorrow, but they’re maybe enough to make everything else bearable, survivable at least.
I have to say that I do echo Robin’s sentiments that I quoted at the beginning of this review. It does seem that the older we all get, there are fewer and fewer things we unreservedly love. And it is deeply traumatic to lose those things. I suppose Robin would say that we should invest in those things anyway and I agree. And Pig has now become one of those things for me. This is a movie I deeply, profoundly adore; I’ve only grown to love it more since I first saw it and I can’t recommend it highly enough. 4 stars.
tl;dr – deeply melancholy, beautifully written film is a meditation on love, loss and sorrow anchored by a close to career best Nicolas Cage; sad, but not hopeless, it’s a masterpiece. 4 stars.