Which Academy Award-winning actor has made more than 50 feature films in his now 29-year career, and has worked with the following directors: Michael Bay, The Coen Brothers, Martha Coolidge, Francis Ford Coppola, John Dahl, Brian DiPalma, Mike Figgis, Werner Herzog, Spike Jonze, David Lynch, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorcese, and John Woo?
I'll give you another clue -- it's the same actor whose latest release, Season of the Witch, got a 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
That's right, it's none other than Nicolas Cage. Let's call him Nic, shall we?
There seem to be two types of Nic Cage movies, the really good -- and increasingly far-between -- ones (like Adaptation), and the crappy ones where his characters seem to be struggling with weird prophecies and/or weird hair. Season of The Witch falls firmly into the second category.
Although his Jesus-weave looks okay in Season of The Witch, the story is like donkey shit stuck to your shoe. Nic plays a 14th-Century Crusader who loses his sense of mission after impaling a Turkish woman and defects along with his comrade-at-arms, played by Ron Perlman, in hulking sidekick mode. (Also, the Crusades were already over before the time this film is set. Just sayin'.)
Returning to their home country (unspecified, though the film was shot in Hungary & Austria), they find the people stricken with the plague (lots of boils & other gross makeup). Naturally, this outbreak is blamed on a young, dark-haired woman the locals call the Black Witch. The deserters are recognized and thrown in prison, but their sentence is commuted when they agree to transport the Black Witch (with various other, minor characters who won't survive) to a far-off monastery where there's a book that the monks can read aloud from and break the witch's spell.
They complete the tedious journey, minus a soul or two, only to find that all the monks are also dead from the plague and that the young girl is not a witch -- but is possessed by the Devil. (Luckily, the monks' magic spell book has one for exorcism as well.) There's flapping of leathery wings, zombie monks, immolation and other stuff until all the woo-woo words are spoken and the possession is broken. (Also, Ron Perlman head-butts the Devil. Perhaps his agent will be next.)
So, yet another crappy Nic Cage movie has been unleashed into the world, with Drive Angry (in 3D, no less) to arrive next month. You'd think we would have become immune to the mediocrity of Nic's choices by now, and yet we've not. (In fact, people have retained a weird affection for him, an example of which is Nic Cage as Everyone, a very funny blog where people submit photoshopped images of Nic Cage as, well, everyone.)
I've been informally polling my cinema co-workers and other friends and almost everyone still has an opinion, awareness, or expression of alarm about Nic's increasingly dire output. Nobody complains when Matthew McConaughey makes another mediocre movie, but that's because his acting range consists of shirt on or shirt off. But Nic Cage, when the spirit moves him, can still act.
The most recent case in point is a wonderfully "out there" film entitled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, this is Werner Herzog's "re-imagining" of Abel Ferrara's 1992 movie (which starred Harvey Keitel as a NYPD Lieutenant, moaning and swinging his ween). Herzog makes great use of Nic's manic energy, and this new Lieutenant's rage and pain feel very real (plus, Nic has a "lucky" crack pipe and no one has to see Harvey's dick this time).
Some of my other favorite Nic Cage characters include: the sweet, soulful boyfriend of the Valley Girl (1983); the hapless baby-and-diaper-stealing crook in the early Coen Brothers hit Raising Arizona (1987); Cher's one-handed passione in the crowd-pleasing Moonstruck (1987); Sailor, whose leather jacket signifies his individuality in David Lynch's road-trip-from-hell, Wild at Heart (1990); the man who cannot leave town, no matter how hard he tries, in John Dahl's blackly humorous noir, Red Rock West; his Oscar-winning role as the alcoholic screenwriter on a death spiral in the unglamorous Leaving Las Vegas (1995); twin screenwriters Charlie and Donald Kaufman, cracking the story in Adaptation (2002); and the OCD conman trying to balance work and a daughter in Matchstick Men (2003).
As part of my meditation on the enigma of Nic Cage, I re-watched Adaptation the other day. It's a wonderful, complex film, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, the same team that gave us the delirious Being John Malkovich. The break-all-the-rules story uses a fictionalized Charlie Kaufman (as played by Nic) as the central character, a hyperanalytical screenwriter struggling to adapt Susan Orleans' The Orchid Thief as a film. In the film (and in the writing credits for the film), Charlie has a twin brother named Donald, also played by Nic, who is identical in looks but opposite to Charlie in every other way. Donald is completely obtuse and oblivious to the agonizing self-doubt that paralyzes Charlie.
Donald, who is at loose ends, decides one day to become a screenwriter himself, which he does by boning up on all the quickie screenplay books and taking a Robert McKee seminar. Donald writes a completely crackpot story called The 3, about a cop, a kidnapper and a victim, all of whom -- ta da! -- are actually the same person, one with multiple personality disorder. Charlie rightly punches holes in the logic of the story, but Donald is undeterred, plugging away with his cracked mirrors motif and choosing "Happy Together" as theme music. I realized that what Donald was writing sounded very much like a bad Nic Cage movie.
Near the end of Adaptation, Charlie shares an experience with Donald of something upsetting he witnessed when they were teenagers -- a girl Donald liked making fun of him when his back was turned. Donald tells Charlie that he knew what had happened but that he didn't care, because he still loved the girl: Donald decided that the things he loved defined him, not what loved him.
Perhaps there are two Cages -- Nicolas and Nic -- who function like Charlie and Donald Kaufman. We want Nicholas Cage to reach for the excellence of Charlie, but he'd rather be Donald, riding a motorcycle and having his head catch on fire (with a sequel to come). As long as he makes an occasional Charlie movie, I'm willing to wait it out.
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