Film review: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is funny, poignant and self-aware
Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
★★★★☆
Ever since he first dazzled Hollywood back in the ’80s, Nick Cage (Nicolas Cage) has manfully shouldered (15A).
Nowadays, alas, Nick’s movie career is in a downward spiral. Desperate to pay his bills — rent, alimony, etc — Nick accepts an offer of one million dollars to travel to Majorca to attend the birthday party of his biggest fan, Javi Guttierez (Pedro Pascal), who has somehow found time in his busy schedule running the world’s most notorious arms cartel to write a screenplay that will star Nick Cage.
Written by Kevin Etten and Tom Gormican, with Gormican directing, could very easily have collapsed under the burden of its self-referential conceit. Nic Cage, however — and perhaps unsurprisingly — is rather brilliant at playing himself; or, should we say, sending up his on-screen persona (the film, of course, is littered with references to Cage’s cheesier box-office action hits such as and ).
Wandering around in a funk of baffled rage, trembling on the brink of a nervous breakdown and tormented by his younger, imaginary alter-ego (also played by Cage, this time de-aged by computer wizardry), the narcissistic actor finally finds his metier when he gets sucked into a CIA plot that requires many guns, car-chases and explosions before it is finally resolved.
It’s a sophisticated script that gives us multiple Nic Cages: the action-adventure hero, the sensitive star vulnerable to insecurities, the self-absorbed artist who is estranged from his ex-wife Olivia (Sharon Horgan) and daughter Addy (Lily Mo Sheen), all of which aspects of the Cage myth are hilariously portrayed.
Funny, poignant and painfully self-aware, is this generation’s , and may well prove one of the high points of Nic Cage’s long and varied career.
(cinema release)
