In his latest film, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Nicolas Cage plays himself. This is not, it’s fair to say, much of a career departure. Arguably, Cage has been playing variations on the theme of Nic Cage for the best part of four decades. Part of the fun of a Nic Cage movie, particularly genre fare such as Face/Off or Mandy, is filling in the bingo card of Cage-ian performance tropes – the weird, lurching emphases on random words; the loping roll of a gait, like a hound puppy that hasn’t quite grown into the size of its paws. The volcanic bursts of SHOUTING.
It’s this aspect of his distinctive screen presence that has lately been harnessed into “Cage rage” memes, which quote the most extreme elements of a Cage performance and then magnify them to grotesque comic effect. Cage himself has gone on record expressing his disappointment with the “Cage rage” depiction of his acting approach, arguing, fairly perhaps, that it’s reductive, a denial of the degree of craft he brings to each role. With that in mind, and with his performance in last year’s Pig a reminder that Cage is capable of an extraordinary churning, internalised complexity, his decision to star in this film seems somewhat unexpected.
