Pig is the first full length feature by director Michael Sarnoski and co-writer Vanessa Block, and it features Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld, a traumatized hermit/truffle hunter living in the woods outside of Portland, OR. Alex Wolff (excellent a few years back in Ari Aster's Hereditary) plays the young, hotshot truffle buyer Amir who is Feld's only connection to the outside world, forced into an exceedingly odd buddy-picture as Feld convinces Amir to help him track down his kidnapped life and love, the titular pig.
"Odd buddy-picture" is one way to describe Pig, but it's also a riff on the revenge thriller. I've heard the John Wick series used as a refence point for Pig, but while an inexplicable underground restaurant-worker "fight club" sequence somewhat evokes the hidden criminal world-building of Wick, Sarnoski and Block's tale is much more character-centered, much less action-oriented, and way less convincing. I'm not saying the John Wick franchise is any kind of masterwork (far from it), but, at least, it commits to it's own world-building, while Pig never feels committed to anything the audience can buy into. So, perhaps, Pig is a class-conscious parable that begins in the mud hunting for truffles and journeys into the world of soulless celebrity chefs and their deconstructed scallop dishes, calling out the hypocrisies of the fine-dining world along the way, leaving us with two men forever altered for the better by their experience together? Well, it seems Pig is trying to do all of this, while also attempting to be a serious film about trauma and loss. All of this comes off, simultaneously, as too much for the filmmakers to handle well, and not enough to make the movie a convincing effort in any way.
Yet, the acting in Pig is quite good! I was excited to see Cage and Wolff together, and in their scenes together they manage to slow every eye roll I had; committed performers nailing their characters beat-by-beat in a movie whose design and plotting completely pulled me out scene-after-scene (see: Feld's return to his former Portland home where he encounters a young child, seemingly unalarmed by a bloody, filthy monster-man wandering into his backyard to explain what a persimmon is). Pig is an odd beast: not quite "so-bad-it's-good" fair, and, sadly, promising enough at times that the overall failure of it becomes achingly disappointing. Perhaps it will rest among the various curiosities of the film maudit? Even that seems a little generous. There are a couple of good movies, at least, laying dormant in Pig. I don't want to trash the work of these filmmakers -- they probably have a better movie than this in their future. Pig just feels like a hipster pose, not quite seasoned enough to have the stillness and profundity of Kelly Reichardt at her best, or not quite risky enough to have the bloody, ecstatic pitch of Panos Cosmatos' Mandy.
At this point, the Marvel content machine is beginning to pull away from my circle of attention. I usually see the major films, have seen a bit of the television content, and I genuinely enjoy what I see about half the time. I grew up reading the comics these characters emerge from, so there is still a bit of childlike excitement that accompanies delving back into the MCU. Occasionally, the films have exceeded my expectations, as with Thor: Rangarok, Dr. Strange, and Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. But, just as often the films feel like the cinematic equivalent of fast food hamburgers--product meant to simply fill the void, which is about how I would characterize Black Widow.
Directed by Cate Shortland (Lore-2012; Berlin Syndrome-2017), this "posthumous" tale of a Marvel character marks another example of a director--along with Taika Waititi and Chloé Zhao--who have made only a few smaller budget films before being drafted for an MCU project. I can't speak to the ways in which Shortland might have infused her own directorial signature into Black Widow, not having seen her other films, but this seems like a case where the cookie-cutter nature of this level of filmmaking eclipsed anything terribly personal. It has some pleasant humor. It has a very nicely played character sequence mid-movie where Natasha/Black Widow (ScarJo), Yelena (Florence Pugh), and their Russian super-operative "parents" (David Harbour and Rachel Weisz) reunite on a small farm of mind-controlled pigs. It has Ray Winstone trying on a Russian accent as the big bad, Dreykov. And, it has an aggressively mediocre finale-in-the-sky as they all battle through the falling debris of the hidden sky fortress called "The Red Room." The destruction of the "Red Room" is the film's way of taking down the patriarchy, as is the "red glitter" antidote that restores the mind controlled assassins in the film to their former state of free, feminine will. Like most of Marvel's films, and their attempts at feminism, it all amounts to a pose.
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