In conversation with Vanity Fair, Nicolas Cage claims that he’s nearing the end of his film acting career. Say it ain’t so. We need Cage to continue.
The actor can sense that some kind of end is near, it has caused him to rethink his entire future in Hollywood.
It’s starting to solidify—I’m starting to cement my plan […] I may have three or four more movies left in me.
Cage, who has appeared in at least one film for 37 consecutive years and counting, adds that he’s “said what I’ve had to say with cinema […] I think I took film performance as far as I could.” And, that he has. What an unusually eccentric and memorable career he’s had.
Cage’s 60th birthday in January is something that keeps crossing his mind: “I was taking stock of how much time I had left. I thought, ‘Okay, my dad died at 75, I’m going to be turning 60. If I’m lucky, I have maybe a good 15 years and hopefully more. What do I want to do with those 15 years, using my father as the model?’ It occurred very clearly to me that I want to spend time with my family.”
Cage’s youngest daughter, August Francesca, was born last year — that event has led him to rethink the trajectory of his career. What’s next? His latest Shaman-like acting feat, in A24’s “Dream Scenario,” is another bonkers performance from the actor. In it, he plays a schlubby professor who suddenly starts appearing in people’s dreams.
It’s Cage’s 42nd movie in the last 10 years. Is that a record? Maybe only Bruce Willis has made more in that time span. Regardless, this is a good opportunity to show appreciation for the legend.
Cage has no doubt had a rather strange acting career, especially the last decade or so where his film choices have gotten weirder and weirder. It's come to the point, sadly, where some movie fans just don't take him all that seriously. Which is a shame, because this is the same Oscar-winning actor that has consistently been giving us these brave and exciting performances.
Yes, the 59-year-old actor sometimes does go back to his indie roots and makes, say, a potent indie like "Joe," or the batshit crazy "Mandy," (I really don’t think Cage was acting in the latter. I believe they just put him in a cage, fed him cocaine and let him loose on set). Through and through, Cage’s methodical approach to B-movie acting has, unfairly, done a disservice to his actual talents as an actor, and even turned him into a viral YouTube sensation, but his work has actually been quite revolutionary.
Ethan Hawke has stated that Cage is “the only actor since Marlon Brando that's actually done anything new with the art of acting; he's successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism into a kind of presentation style of acting that I imagine was popular with the old troubadours."
There is a reason why Cage’s B-movies are better than, say, the straight-to-VOD fare John Travolta and Bruce Willis have given us. It's because you can tell Cage is jumping into the role, fully invested and giving it all he’s got. It doesn’t seem to just be about the paycheck for him. He helps bring out entertainment value to the nth degree.
Cage’s gonzo-style acting, which he refers to as Nouveau Shamanic, is the kind of advancement of the acting art form that we haven’t really seen otherwise since, probably, Brando going method in the late ‘50s. Cage credits this style of performing as being inspired by the book “The Way of the Actor” from Brian Bates, which describes the parallel artistry between ancient shamans and thespians. Cage has, more succinctly, summoned up his acting style as a hybrid of German Expressionism and "Western kabuki".
In Cage’s best performances, you watch a style of acting incompatible with the realism invading most movies these days; it’s entertaining, charismatic and, I’m being subtle here, wildly flamboyant. It’s feels like it stems from another dimension.
Many critics have accused Cage of overacting, but they seem to be missing the point. It’s a purposeful act in self-implosion, the notion that you can take any low-rent script, and fit stagey troubadour performing of the late 1800s into it, thus creating art out of pulp. David Lynch has described Cage as “the jazz musician of American acting”. I love that description, because, much like Jazz, there’s an improv-like nature to the delivery of his perfomances that feels incredibly unpredictable and damn-near revolutionary.
So, what have been his best performances? I’ll give you my personal 12, all wide-ranging, in films as diverse as "Adaptation", "Leaving Las Vegas", "Raising Arizona," "Wild At Heart,” "Red Rock West," “Moonstruck,” “Bringing Out the Dead,” “Matchstick Men,” “Lord of War,” “Bad Lieutenant,” “Mandy,” “Pig” and “Dream Scenario.”
There are many more and Cage tells Vanity Fair that he hopes 2008’s “Bangkok Dangerous” gets reappraised:
Bangkok Dangerousgot really crushed by the critics, but I saw [David Fincher’s] The Killer recently, which was a very well-crafted movie and everybody was very good in it, and it was also about an assassin. But I thought that Bangkok Dangerous really went for the heart of the character. It wasn’t as nihilistic. I think that movie could perhaps stand a few more viewings in light of The Killer.
I haven’t seen “Bangkok Dangerous.” It’s now on my queue, despite its 9 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Never doubt Cage.