The Retirement Plan

In “The Retirement Plan,” Nicolas Cage stars as Matt Robbins, or Jim Benton, either/or, or maybe neither, a one-time nebulous government operative, possibly assassin, exiled by his employers to the Cayman Islands, with stringy grey hair and an estranged daughter, Ashley (Ashley Greene). He’s John Mason, in other words, Sean Connery’s hero of “The Rock,” which co-starred Cage, and I wonder if that parallel intrigued the actor, his sixth credited movie of 2023, because I’m not sure what else drew Cage to this material, other than filming on location in the Caymans. Not that the Caymans themselves feel truly present, despite so much blue water in the background, as the $20 million budget of Tim Brown’s would-be action/adventure honestly feels half that, maybe one-fourth.

We first see Matt, or Jim, or Nic Cage passed out on a beach where he is woken by his granddaughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell), having been sent to the west Caribbean by her mother with a computer drive in tow that Ashley’s husband has taken from crime boss Donnie (Jackie Earle Haley) who answers to the bigger crime boss Hector Garcia (Grace Byers) who is in cahoots with Christopher (Rick Fox) which is more than half of it, maybe, but not quite all of it, not that any of it really matters. Despite a conclusion that wants to convey the American State has so much palace intrigue, this isn’t a paranoid thriller but a middling one. None of the action, and I mean none of the action, lands, lazily conceived and amateurishly staged, strictly straight to video streaming stuff despite having received a theatrical release. The tone is hardly better, sometimes striving for true darkness, like the unceremonious death of a hostage, so unconvincing as to feel stupidly cruel, and other times straining for screwball comedy, such as in a recurring customs agent bit, though both the editing and many of the performances struggle to evince the necessary snap, rendering the whole enterprise fatally flat.

Despite the presence of Cage, “The Retirement Plan” is oddly determined to turn the whole enterprise into an ensemble piece, introducing its myriad characters with freeze-frames while flashing their names across the screen, like this is a Guy Ritchie joint. Few of these characters as written or played, or both, are memorable, especially Greene, who the movie puts on screen constantly yet hardly seems to remember exists, as her entire performance is reduced to being panicked and/or flustered. If anyone leaves a mark it’s Ron Perlman, who gets more screen time with Matt, or Jim, or Nic Cage’s granddaughter than Cage does, effecting an unlikely big teddy bear air that could have built to something though even that fizzles in the name of ostensible surprise. When he’s on screen, Cage is at least committed, his Hawaiian shirt living out the notion suggested by one character that he’s inoculated to death. And if he did it for a Cayman vacation only, well, I can’t really blame him, but I can blame myself for having chosen this as the Cage movie of 2023 that I watched, better luck next year.

Top 5 Nicolas Cage Performances

I did not necessarily mean for this week to turn into Nic Cage week, but here we are. Because I really wanted to write about Cage’s purportedly transitory (but not really) “The Trust” on the heels of writing about Cage’s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” and, hey, one thing led to another, I scribbled my five favorite Cage turns on a Post-it and decided to post. I mean, why not? When on blogger… A couple notes: 1.) “Pig” is not included. It’s a great performance, perhaps Top 5 worthy, but just barely a year old and as such, in need of more time for reflection. 2.) I still adore “Leaving Las Vegas,” it’s fantastic, and Cage in it, don’t misunderstand, but I’ve always considered Shue the true MVP there, and anyway, let’s talk some Cage turns that aren’t the ones that won the Oscar.

Note: these are not ranked, and in something like spiritual order as opposed to alphabetical order.

Moonstruck. The key Cage performative text, I’ve come to realize, in so much as he is going over the top, just like the opera you see his character attend, and which has frequently informed his turns to varying degrees and in different ways ever since, leading boring people who demand believability in all mythical flickering images to not grasp that Cage is the most prominent modern-day tenor of the movies.

The Weather Man. In his air, the Long Beach-born Cage finds the key of a Chicago winter, moving and wearing the weary expressions of a Windy City denizen in late April where there is still a goddam chance of snow.  

Raising Arizona. Some movie performances are in and of themselves special effects, like Vincent D’Onofrio in “Men in Black,” like Anne Baxter in “The Ten Commandments,” and like Nic Cage in “Raising Arizona.” Indeed, in rewatching the whole Coen Bros. oeuvre during the lockdown part of the Pandemic, Friend of the Blog Willie noted that in “Raising Arizona” Cage turned himself into a Looney Tone, which is a more evocative description of Cage’s astonishing physical expressiveness in the second Coen brothers movie than I could ever hope to devise and meaning that Cage homages Wiley E. Coyote by defying gravity in his own way, effecting gestures and mannerisms and movements that couldn’t possibly be effected by a real person until you remind yourself that what you’re watching isn’t animated.

Kick-Ass. As the superhero father to a superhero daughter, Cage strikes a resonant, profound balance between nobility and hubris, between genuine paternal protection and being blind to his own  fatherly heedlessness. 

Red Rock West. In John Dahl’s 1993 neo-noir, Cage is reading his character’s swaggering, cigarette-smoking Cool not as charismatic indifference but a total bluff of desperation.

Mandy. “Wait,” you’re saying, “this is a top five and isn’t this number six?” Yes, astute reader, it is, and what of it? You think Nic Cage would concoct a Top 5 bound by its own specified limits? 2 is 1, 11 is 7, 6 is 5, and in “Mandy” Cage translated the Italian opera of “Moonstruck” into Italian horror, avenging his wife with a soulful anguish that skillfully builds to a concluding scene where his sears-into-your-brain unhinged facial expression sends the notion of cosmic law and order up in flames.

Leaving Las Vegas. You know what, I changed my mind. I can’t leave this out. 7 is 5, and 7 +5 is 12, and 12 is the number of divine authority, or so Google tells me. 

Mandy

After a hard day logging in The Shadow Mountains of the Mojave, Red (Nicolas Cage) returns to his frontier abode to find his wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) drawing at her easel and proceeds to tell her an Erik Estrada knock knock joke. Indeed, if the soundtrack’s omnipresent synths and the blood red visuals evoking heavy metal album cover art don’t clue you in, this joke is here to tell you the time – it’s 1983. Ah, but don’t presume this is some nostalgia trip. No, if anything, “Mandy”, not so much directed and co-written by Panos Cosmatos as divined by black magic, is an acid trip, even if you haven’t dropped any, evoked in a sequence where Red and Mandy lie in bed discussing their favorite planets. Cosmatos imagines their bedroom as a roofless planetarium where they are bathed in the shifting lights of the cosmos, which Cosmatos eventually cuts to all on its own, reveling in its colorful splendor. And despite the movie’s ensuing repulsive bloodshed, this shot, more than any Pure Flix production ever could, makes you believe, agnostic or not, just for a second, in a Biblical firmament.

This indelible sequence epitomizes the overall pictorial majesty, where Cosmatos intends not just to visually convey the story but blow your mind. Terrifying close encounters flicker in and out like an arthouse haunted house and during a dinnertime conversation between our two lovers Red, both the person and the color, gradually dissolve from the frame, leaving merely Mandy, coated in a chilly blue, underscoring the foreboding nature of her words. Even the pauses between psychedelic palettes are meant to grab your attention, like when the heinous Children of the New Dawn cult is summoning demons with a mystical conch. As they wait, one cult member, evoking Jake Busey’s own cultish fiend in “Contact” (an obscure reference that “Mandy” demands), rolls his automatic car window up and down, up and down, nothing big perhaps but part of the whole everything-is-a-little-weird fabric.

The Children of the New Dawn are lorded over by Jeremiah Sand, played by Linus Roache with hair like Khan and sad-sloped eyes like Jeffrey Tambor in “The Death of Stalin”, a performance that pulls the immaculate trick of being both jaw-droppingly wicked and easily laughed at, and immediately renders Tarantino’s forthcoming Manson movie as no longer required. Sand vaguely references some sort of ascension, but it quickly becomes clear he lords over his charges less with bold promises than some kind of rocket fuel hallucinogen, outlined in a sequence after they have kidnapped Mandy. In an unbroken shot, Sand orates his faux-magisterial motivation, charismatically holding us in the palm of his hand, until it gradually becomes clear he’s totally full of it. Mandy knows it too, which Cosmatos initially communicates to us by the way he has her face metaphysically blend with Sand’s as he speaks, only to have her face vanish again, like he’s trying to acquire her soul and she ain’t having it. Nope, because when he’s finished, she laughs, she laughs at him hard, like the Laker Girls laughing at Kit Ramsey (an obscure reference that “Mandy” demands).

This leads her to death, which leads to Red’s revenge as he works his way through demons and men and women, one by one. The violent retribution evokes innumerable Cage works, but if so many of those other efforts have tonally failed to rise to its leading man’s patented bug-eyed, frenzied level, hanging him out to dry, making him appear comical and dooming him to memes when, in fact, he’s committed to the product more than the movie itself would ever dare to be, Cosmatos crafts a tone to match Cage’s. When Bill Duke makes a cameo in a part that may as well be his “Predator” character in an alternate dimension to explain exactly what’s going on, the operatic busted lip aggravation in Cage’s grimace as he listens harmonizes so precisely with the bananas lyricism of Duke’s words that Cage, for once, looks right at home in his movie rather than a crazed interloper.

Cage’s resplendent mania is what prevents the back half of “Mandy”, a relentless series of death, from becoming, despite oft-painterly innovation, like a chainsaw duet, from devolving into mere revenge porn. It also prevents the movie from straying too far into cynicism. An early moment finds Red at the wheel of his car, listening to Ronald Reagan’s famous Evil Empire speech before switching it off. This is the movie disregarding the values the 40th President claims Americans cherish before proceeding to take those values to the woodshed, not just through Red’s violent avenging and Sand’s repulsive insanity but in “Mandy” eventually mocking its own sense of mysticism. The latter is most gloriously evinced in the haunting conclusion where Red, his face splattered in blood, seems to see Mandy riding in the passenger’s seat of his car, a hallucination turning every Dream Lover movie scene inside-out. If it seems to lay bare the firmament as mere gas and dust, it is nevertheless still so eerily beautiful as to be uplifting.

Wistfully '95: Leaving Las Vegas

Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa.

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Though alcoholism is a serious disease, its portrayal at the movies is often treacly, where life-threatening drinking problems can be cured in the space of a montage (“Crazy Heart”) or worse. “It’s all wonderfully romantic, especially in the movies,” the late great Roger Ebert wrote of the silver screen alcoholism, “where a little groaning in the morning replaces nausea, headaches, killer hangovers and panic attacks.” Of course, Mr. Ebert was rather famously an alcoholic, one who stopped drinking in 1979, as he outlined in his invaluable piece in the last years of his life. Mr. Ebert also was a great champion of Mike Figgis’ 1995 film about an alcoholic who drinks himself to death, “Leaving Las Vegas.” He called it a “masterpiece.” He named it the best film of 1995. Perhaps I’m overstepping my bounds but it’s not difficult to wonder if Mr. Ebert saw in “Leaving Las Vegas”, in the plight of Nicolas Cage’s Ben, a road (thankfully) not taken. “Most alcoholics continue to drink as long as they can,” Ebert wrote. “For many, that means death. Unlike drugs in most cases, alcohol allows you to continue your addiction for what's left of your life, barring an accident. The lucky ones find their bottom, and surrender.” Ben does find his bottom and he does surrender, though the waving of his white flag takes a different form.

After a table-setting sequence in Los Angeles, Ben comes to Las Vegas with the express mission of drinking himself to death. And the film does not skimp on this mission. He gets the shakes, hallucinates, injures and embarrasses himself, the whole nine yards. And the Vegas of Figgis’s film is not the tourist’s life; it’s the seedy side. Not the underbelly, mind you, but the side, like you feel as if the camera is always catching everything in Sin City that you’d be seeing just around corner or down that alley where you don’t want to look. The soundtrack underscores this vibe. Perhaps the saxophone sounds cheesy, even dated to 2015 ears, but that’s just right. No high-priced soundtrack would do; this is the soundtrack of a beggar on the corner playing jazz for your nickels.

Yet as dark as all that sounds, as realistic as its portrayal of an alcoholic’s descent is, there is a strange romantic grandeur. Ben, understand, is not romanticized, but the film also wishes to at least look toward the sunny side of the street from the dark side across the way. When Ben arrives at his hotel, it’s not the MGM Grand, it’s The Hole You’re In, and as he reads the sign and figures out the pun, he smiles. He sees the humor in it. He sees the humor in life. Cage acknowledges the complications in his character. There are moments in this film when you catch a glimpse of the Ben he most likely once was; kind, even charming. When he’s fired his boss, you can tell his boss likes him, feels sorry for him, but has no choice. Perhaps he knows Ben needs help but perhaps he knows Ben is long past the point of help. It’s time to step aside.

The story turns when he meets Sera. She’s a hooker, though her heart is not exactly woven from gold. It is battered and bruised even if, in periodic conversations throughout the film with a therapist (never seen), she cops to a good feeling from her profession, a feeling of control. Of course, she is also controlled by her pimp (Julian Sands), who is smartly moved out of the picture, as she enters Ben’s life, first accidentally and then deliberately. She comes to care for him but she’s not there just to take care of him. She’s granted her own off screen life, one that unintentionally merges with Ben’s, as if by divine intervention. Maybe it is as she transforms into an approximation of an angel called upon to watch over him, to meet him on his earthly departure. That might sound maudlin, but it’s not, the film never pandering, because its characters never pander, because they look one another in the eye and embrace their respective realities, which is a helluva lot more than you can say about a lotta people who likely fancy themselves more in touch than these two.

If movies often revolve around identity, finding it, losing it, changing it, re-claiming it, there is little in the way of an Identity Crisis in “Leaving Las Vegas.” These two people are who they are, entirely accepting of the other person’s flaws, uninterested in forcing the other to correct those flaws. Movies, of course, are not ordinarily meant to be this way because movies are supposed to chronicle some perceptible change in their characters. But that's only because so many movie characters are engaged in some sort of self-deception. “Leaving Las Vegas”, bless its soul, is a movie where no one engages in self-deception. The only moment when that does not hold true is Sera asking Ben to stop drinking. But look at the sorrowful way Shue plays the scene, and listen to the meekness in her voice when she makes the plea; she knows she's lying to herself by asking, and yet she asks anyway. And because she grasps her willful, and useless, delusion, it becomes the movie's most tragic moment.

Of course, if there is no change then that means we are simply watching an alcoholic waste away with a hooker at his side. And this is true. It's a slow descent into death, a fulfilling of Ben's quest, the anti-hero's journey. It's not easy to watch, but it's also affecting to watch, if only because in coming together Ben and Sera find, as Ebert noted, “a measure of grace” in one another. In its own weird, twisted, fascinating, beautiful way, it's as moving an explication of selflessness as a motion picture has ever captured.

That's not to say these people are good people, in a traditional sense. They have made bad decisions, perhaps, a bounty of them, but “Leaving Las Vegas” understands the difference between those decisions and their innate human nature. It sees past their respective trails of destruction without denying or softening what they have done, and, by the end, that familiar glow has nothing to do with sin city neon and everything to do with the fractured light of Ben and Sera's souls.

Joe

The name Joe denotes such a certain kind of American masculinity, the kind that drives GMC’s and has a hard labor job to do and beers to drink after it’s done and perhaps a punch or two to throw in between, that it has rendered a sizable idiom within the lexicon. And “Joe”, the seventh feature film of eclectic Texan filmmaker David Gordon Green, is awash in this masculinity, being as how it revolves almost exclusively around combustible males, in particular a father, a father figure and the young boy caught between two who is fighting to come of age in a place where hanging on seems the best for which one could possibly hope.

That young boy is Gary, a 15 year old with a home life so unstable he may as well be a vagrant. He is played by Tye Sheridan, and while the role may not sound like much of a departure from his work in another recent southern-fried film, the extraordinary “Mud” of 2013, upon closer inspection, he is playing this part with a whole different bent. Sheridan may be older here but he feels younger, less self-assured and less resourceful, purposely a product of his sketchy environment. Still, he’s smart enough to know he doesn’t want to end up like his driftless old man, and so when he stumbles upon a wooded job site one day, he clamors for a job on the crew.

So often work at the movies is mere window dressing, like the newspaper columnist without any deadlines, but the work in “Joe” is real, not just in the manual labor intensity of it but in the way it drives and lifts up and puts down these tough-talking men. The title character, a noble if complicated soul, played by a disheveled Nicolas Cage with a downhome goodwill that masks and eventually gives way to a hotheadedness that the actor makes clear he prefers, runs a ragtag company in Texas that is hired by lumber companies to poison trees past their prime to make them easier to chop down. These early scenes have a remarkable atmospheric rhythm, a fatigue the back-breaking work creates but also the dignity the mere notion of employment engenders.

These are prideful men, aware of their flaws, literally trying to work them out through the work, and it is almost exclusively men. Women hover, barely, in the background, reduced to browbeaten wives as well as whores whom Joe regularly visits as another means to exercise the demons within. A girl he’s seeing, sort of, suggests how proper it might be if they got dressed up one night and went to dinner. It smells like a payoff. It isn’t. His heart is gracious, it’s not gold.

The film is based on a 1991 novel by Larry Brown, yet its similarities to “Gran Torino” are noticeable. That was the 2008 Clint Eastwood opus tracking a grizzly man who becomes not only an unlikely mentor to a young protégé, but sacrifices himself to, in essence, protégé a way from a no-way-out situation. “Joe’s” plot shares a similar tract, and even works in a symbolic vehicle of its own, as Joe himself becomes untraditional mentor and while the ultimate catharsis feels genuine, the plotting is somewhat incongruous. For instance, the character of Willie-Russell (Ronnie Gene Blevins), is an apparition of antagonism, drifting in and out of the picture, only appearing if confrontation is required for story advancement. Joe himself, meanwhile, is bestowed a sense of fatalism that so neatly aligns with the film’s concluding turns, it becomes less fatalistic by the end than pre-ordained luxury.

The soul of the film, paradoxically, is its most despicable character, Wade, the father of Gary, played by Gary Poulter, a non-actor whom Green literally plucked off the street (and who has an incredible and incredibly sad real life tale). There is virtually nothing to redeem him. He is in poverty and willing to steal from his own son just to have a few bucks. He is an alcoholic and willing to beat a homeless man for a bottle. Cash and Liquor come before Blood and work of any sort – let alone hard work – are impenetrable concepts to him. The last one would appear “Joe’s” primary interest, a degenerate who retains an almost wicked sense of entitlement contrasted against a son desperate to prove self-worth.

It’s an ancient tale – sons paying for the sins of the father. Which might suggest story obviousness on the part of “Joe” but then part of its aim is to demonstrate how the cycle consumes – how the son claims he won’t follow in his father’s un-heroic footsteps, only to follow in them anyway. Overcoming where we come from by being who we are is no simple task, yet with a little help from Joe, it appears possible Gary might just succeed.