Nicolas Cage Is a Genius and I Won't Hear Another Word

Note: We're running this article because on Friday August 10 the Melbourne International Film Fest is running a Cage-a-thon at the Astor. It'll be a weird night.

It’s 2018 and Nicolas Cage is a total maniac. Well, by reputation at least: gone are the days when Cage—who has an Academy Award on his mantlepiece in whatever castle he’s currently living in—was called upon to play recognisably plausible human beings. Now he’s sold to audiences as a cartoon Tasmanian Devil. A spinning whirlwind of destruction tearing apart films through sheer intensity. Three words: “Not the beeeees”

Even this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival can’t help it. The MIFF guide describes the seven film Cage-a-thon at The Astor as “operatic, Nouveau Shamanic and gloriously OTT!” Sure, when the line-up includes Vampire’s Kiss, Drive Angry, and The Wicker Man—not to mention the completely unhinged-sounding Mandy—even that description risks underselling just how out-there things are going to get.

But while the message, much like Cage’s recent work, is extremely loud and relatively clear—a Nicolas Cage performance is a freak show—it’s in no way correct. Today and every day, Nicolas Cage is actually a genius.

In part it’s because he takes his characters to strange new places. But even while he’s playing an unhinged lunatic he’s always able to ground that performance in something identifiably human—rage, pain, confusion, despair. He’s brilliant at playing broken characters, but when he wants to be a plain old nice guy there’s no-one more charming and likable. Plus he’s always great value. No matter how bad the film or slip-shod the story, Cage is always charismatic and always an entertainer. He simply couldn’t sustain his current direct-to-DVD career if he wasn’t so fun to watch.

Most of all, he’s an acting great because he never gives an inappropriate performance. He is always, every time, without fail 100 percent in-tune with what the film requires, and every time he gives his role exactly what it requires to make the whole film better. No less and—amazingly, considering his current reputation—no more.

Related: watch this VICE doco on the dodgy accountant who once managed Leonardo Dicaprio's money.

This is obviously hard to believe if you’ve just watched Brian Naylor’s 2017 film Mom and Dad, in which the world’s parents all simultaneously decide to brutally murder their children. The whole point of the film is that hey, Cage is going to really go nuts this time—and as always, he delivers (he single-handedly tears apart his own pool table, and that’s before the never-explained urge to murder his bratty kids overwhelms him).

But it’s the scenes where he’s just a middle-aged dad wondering how his life when wrong that make his character—and the film—work. And Cage can go nuts because he’s not carrying the emotional weight (such as it is) of the film: it’s Selma Blair as his wife who’s the real heart here. He’s got a supporting role where he’s asked to add over-the-top energy to a film that wouldn’t work without a cartoony edge—and that’s exactly what he provides.

Or take David Gordon Green’s 2013 film Joe, in which Cage plays a taciturn logger who steps in to protect a young boy from his abusive father. Cage’s performance is a masterpiece of rough-hewn understatement: whenever Joe lashes out it’s legitimately startling. And yet, this is Nicolas Cage, the master of mayhem, giving a performance where violence is always both abrupt and a violation, a character giving in to his worst impulses. It’s a performance where Cage is able to erase our memories of everything he’s done before and simply embody an all-too-human character. And there aren’t too many other movie stars who can do that after 30 years in the spotlight.

So where did this reputation for on-screen excess come from? It depends on who you ask. For Cage, he’s still out there trying new things:

“If you look at the work carefully, there’s a Bad Lieutenant and then there’s a Knowing. And there’s a Lord of War and a National Treasure… I’m always trying to make things eclectic… One of the reasons why I frustrate critics is because they don’t know what to do with me. I don’t get stuck, I actively go against it.”

And for pretty much everyone else, he’s working like a maniac playing a maniac because he has to dig himself out of a massive tax hole resulting from a dodgy former manager and a decade-long spending spree. That binge included buying two castles, one of the “most haunted houses in America”, his own private island in the Bahamas, a collection of shrunken heads, a copy of Action Comics #1 and out-bidding Leonardo DiCaprio on a real dinosaur skull that turned out to be stolen so he had to give it back.

It probably doesn’t help that he’s described his own somewhat unique acting style as “Nouveau Shamanic,” which either means a call back to shamanic traditions where a performer embodies the concerns of their community, or an extremely thin excuse to do whatever the hell he was doing in Deadfall. “Baby’s a little cranky tonight, huh?”

And when he does go over the top, it’s not like he’s giving the same stock crazy performance each time. They’re all characters in extreme situations, but the crazed wannbe-vampire of Vampire’s Kiss is very different from the drug-addled broken cop in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, while the heart-breaking heart-broken alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas is a long way from the uptight cop in The Wicker Man (which is obviously a comedy anyway, dammit).

More often these days, Cage goes big because Cage knows going big is a big marketing hook. He might be playing a real-life character in One Man Army, but seeing Cage go full Cage against the Taliban is what you’ve really paid to see there. Meanwhile, the movies where he dials it down and gives solid performances as plausible human beings—like Paul Schrader’s 2014 thriller Dying of the Light, in which Cage plays an aged and crumbling CIA agent tormented by his past—are largely ignored at best and (in Dying of the Light’s case) re-edited by the studio and disowned by the director at worst.

But the one irrefutable fact that demolishes the case that Cage is out-of-control is this: Cage never destroys a movie. Even in his biggest performances, he never goes bigger than the film he’s in. How do we know? Because there are plenty of Cage movies where he could easily go over the top, but doesn’t.

In Stolen, Cage happily plays a perfectly entertaining straight action hero while Josh Lucas’ deranged bad guy pretty much steals the film out from under him. In Dog Eat Dog, he’s up against crazy acting master Willem Dafoe—but Cage underplays his dim crook character and plays him as a sad sack of desperation rather than a scene-stealer. He’s an actor who’ll happily play things quiet when it makes for a better film. And even when the end result isn’t great, it’s never because he took it too far.

To be fair, there is one film where he breaks that rule: 1995’s Kiss of Death. It’s the film David Caruso quit NYPD Blue for, the film that was going to finally made him a movie star. Instead, Cage stole it out from under him, dominated every scene he was in—including one where he for real bench-pressed a woman repeatedly without breaking a sweat—and it’s not even in his top 20 most memorable performances. Caruso’s movie career never recovered.

So how good is Nicolas Cage, the actor? So good the only time he stole a movie, it was to kill David Caruso’s Hollywood career. Clearly the man is a hero.

(By the way, if you’re looking to check out more Cage post-MIFF, these films are a good place to start).

*Totally normal nice guy Cage: As seen in The Weather Man, Guarding Tess, Honeymoon in Vegas, City of Angels, even World Trade Centre.

*Arthouse legend and serious actor Cage: Adaptation. Leaving Las Vegas. Bringing Out the Dead. These are brilliant, nuanced, subtle performances revealing the humanity in characters in extreme situations.

*Blockbuster sell-out Cage: Everyone knows The Rock and Face/Off ( Snake Eyes and 8MM? Not so memorable). But remember how he made not one but two National Treasure movies? And then he was in Disney kids film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? And he was one of the main voices in The Croods?

*He’s so good, he can give performances that are basically impersonations and they’re still amazing. Wild at Heart is the best movie Elvis never made. He even does Adam West better than West in Kick-Ass.

If you're interested in the Cage-a-thon, you can get tickets here. And follow Anthony on Twitter