Above: Nicolas Cage's eyebrows have their own acting coach. (Editor's note: probably not true.)The upcoming release of Kick-Ass, which I'm probably more excited for than any other movie this summer with the possible exception of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, is as good a time as any to address this topic, which has been percolating in my brain for longer than it's probably healthy to admit. With the possible exception of Robert DeNiro, I can't think of any prolific actor whose career choices have been as widely and openly maligned. For instance: in commemoration of the opening of Knowing last winter, EW's Owen Gleiberman wrote a piece entitled "Nicolas Cage: Artist or Hack?", and Peter Travers wrote a blog-length kvetch about the (indisputably true) fact that Cage's worst movies are also his most financially successful. The standard format for the argument against Nicolas Cage is that he started out as a daring and promising young actor, sold out to blockbuster Hollywood immediately after winning Best Actor in 1995, and has since been cashing checks left and right by lazing his way through uninspired B-movies.
Factually, this analysis is correct. Cage did indeed have a pretty incredible string of roles in the late 80s/early 90s (Raising Arizona, Vampire's Kiss, Wild At Heart and the like), and pretty much immediately went into big-budget action filmmaking after winning the Oscar. Also, a substantial proportion of his movies since that time have been terrible (worst offenders being Ghost Rider and Gone in 60 Seconds, by my reckoning, although there's quite a few I haven't seen). Even so, I'm going to argue that not only has Nicolas Cage not wasted his talent in his post-Oscar work, his career choices make him one of the most interesting actors in the movie business. Let's break this down into a series of simple points.
1. Pretty much all award-winning actors go on to make underwhelming movies.
Let's be honest: most feature-length dramas aren't very good. In fact, most critically praised feature-length dramas aren't even very good. And yet, if an Oscar-winning actor wants to "live up" to his talent in his subsequent role choices, the widespread perception is that acting in dramas is the best way to do so. As a result, most of them follow up award wins with horseshit middlebrow films that everyone pretends to care about for five minutes and promptly forgets. Consider the subsequent films of some of the Best Actor winners since Cage won in '95 for Leaving Las Vegas. Roberto Benigni followed up Life is Beautiful (which, for the record, is a movie I despise) by playing the lead role in Pinocchio (no, really). I don't think we even need to mention Kevin Spacey, but in case you forgot: Pay It Forward, K-Pax, and The Shipping News. Denzel Washington did Antwone Fisher after winning for Training Day. Adrian Brody followed up The Pianist with motherfucking The Village. Even Daniel Day Lewis, who's been in something like three movies his entire career, did that musical remake of 8 1/2 that came out last Christmas after winning for There Will Be Blood.
The idea that Nicolas Cage deprived the world of a plethora of brilliant dramatic performances in order to become the next Sylvester Stallone is bullshit. If you were faced with the choice between making umpteen "respectable" variations on Captain Corelli's Mandolin for the remainder of your career or turning yourself into the most overqualified B-movie star in Hollywood history, which would you pick? Moreover, which would you find more challenging or artistically satisfying? This leads us to point number 2...
2. Nicolas Cage almost always substantially improves the bad movies he's in.
Whatever you can say about the quality of his movie choices (any you can obviously say a lot), Cage can't be accused of misunderstanding the fundamentals of B-movie acting. Take, for instance, Con Air, Cage's second action movie after winning the Oscar, which combines an idiotic premise with thoroughly incompetent direction and yet manages to be fantastically entertaining. The latter fact is almost completely due to the casting choices: along with Cage, the movie features John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, and John Cusack, plus a slew of recognizable B-listers, and gives all of them free reign to chew as much scenery as they like. Although the protagonist is written as a run of the mill action hero, Cage plays him with a stoned stupor and a gleefully over-the-top hillbilly drawl. His Forrest Gump-meets-Steven Seagal performance works because it acknowledges both the underlying ridiculousness of the movie and the need to make it entertaining (the same applies to a lot of the leads in Con Air, especially Malkovich).
I can't think of many Nicolas Cage movies that would have been better if they had starred someone else. In fact, most of them would have been worse. Cage gets a fair amount of shit for his overacting, but it's worth mentioning that very few of the movies to which that criticism applies would be improved in any tangible sense by more subtlety. If you've seen Knowing, try to mentally substitute, say, Johnny Depp in the lead role. Would it have been a more enjoyable movie if it featured Depp's trademark eyebrow raising and muttering instead of Nic Cage's trademark manic gesticulating? A hint: no. It would just have made it boring to watch.
Without question, the most glorious example of Nicolas Cage's willingness to go to excess in support of a work of dubious value is in Neil LaBute's staggeringly unnecessary remake of The Wicker Man. There's a fairly famous YouTube compilation of the most over-the-top moments from the film that I'm not going to link to (assuming it hasn't been removed for copyright violation) because seeing the scenes out of context hardly does justice to the sheer inexplicable craziness of the full film. I think of The Wicker Man remake not as a failed attempt at a coherent filmed narrative, but as a deeply personal collaborative attempt by Nicolas Cage and Neil LaBute to merge their dominant artistic impulses (respectively, barely suppressed emotional extremes and hatred of women) into a single work. In that sense (and none other), it's a complete success as a film. Even if you don't care to submit The Wicker Man to a close reading, you can't go wrong marveling at the ridiculousness of it with some friends over beers, and that's far from low praise in my book.
3. He's also done a surprising amount of legitimately fine work.
Something that often gets overlooked in the discussion about late-period Nicolas Cage is that he's also done a lot of good acting in some really good movies alongside the B-grade action flicks. Adaptation is probably the most widely acknowledged of these, but there are others, like the underrated Matchstick Men and Lord of War, and last year's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is probably the best argument for the artistic value of Cage's manic tendencies to date.
Moreover, it's hard to argue that Cage should have turned down many of the dramatic movies that he's starred in that didn't exactly set the world on fire. I doubt most leading men in Hollywood would pass on opportunities to work with Martin Scorcese, Brian DePalma, or Oliver Stone. Even something like Windtalkers, a World War II movie made back when people were still holding out hope for John Woo's Hollywood career, probably seemed like an acceptable risk.
The real issue with Nicolas Cage circa the past 15 years isn't that he does bad work, or even that the bad work outweighs the good work. Rather, it's that the sheer volume of movies he stars in makes him a difficult actor to pin down. This is an actor so prolific that in the first half of the 2000s, he starred in no less than three separate films entitled "The ______ Man." I don't think Cage's chronic inability to not be making a movie at any given point in time (which is hardly an exaggeration, per his IMDB page, he's averaged three films a year over the past decade) is necessarily a bad thing. It just guarantees that his output is going to be wildly uneven. This year alone he's in the promising-looking Kick-Ass and the promising-sounding The Hungry Rabbit Jumps (it has Guy Pearce and is from the director of the The Bank Job, which I enjoyed.) He's also in this movie, henceforth to be referred to as Some Bullshit About Witches:
So it goes. In 2011, he'll be starring in a 3-D movie called Drive Angry, summarized as "A vengeful father chases after the men who killed his daughter." I can't wait.
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