Nicolas Cage: A Career in Commitment

Nicolas Cage does not make bad movies.

Nicolas Cage makes committed movies. The distinction matters. A bad performance is lazy. A Cage performance is never lazy. It is frequently inexplicable. It is occasionally terrifying. But lazy is the one thing it never is.

The man ate a live cockroach for Vampire's Kiss. Not a prop. Not a gummy. A cockroach. Because the scene required it. Because he decided the scene required it. The director did not ask him to eat the cockroach. Cage decided. That's the whole career in one sentence.

The Method

Cage has described his approach as "Nouveau Shamanic." This is not a joke. He has used this phrase in interviews. He means it.

The approach, as far as this critic can determine, involves making a choice — any choice — and then committing to it with such intensity that the film bends around the performance rather than the other way around. The movie becomes a container for whatever Cage has decided to do. Sometimes the container holds. Sometimes it shatters. Both outcomes are watchable.

This is not method acting. Method actors disappear into roles. Cage does not disappear. Cage arrives. Loudly. In every scene. With choices.

The Essential Five

1. Vampire's Kiss (1988)

The most unhinged Cage performance. A literary agent believes he is turning into a vampire. Cage plays this with the conviction of a man who has also considered the possibility that he is turning into a vampire.

The alphabet scene — in which Cage recites the ABCs with escalating mania in a therapist's office — is the Rosetta Stone of his career. Every choice he would make for the next thirty-five years is encoded in those twenty-six letters.

He ate the cockroach. He bought fake vampire teeth from a novelty shop and wore them for scenes the director hadn't planned. He invented a walk. The walk alone justifies the film.

2. The Wicker Man (2006)

Cage in a bear suit punching a woman. Cage screaming "not the bees" while bees are poured on his face. Cage bicycle-kicking a woman across a room.

The original Wicker Man (1973) is a masterpiece of British folk horror. This remake is a masterpiece of something else entirely. Cage treats every scene as though the film is Chinatown and he is Jack Nicholson and the mystery is real and the stakes are life and death. The film does not support this level of intensity. The film collapses under it. Cage does not notice. Cage is too busy investigating.

3. Con Air (1997)

The accent. The hair. The bunny.

Cage plays Cameron Poe, a paroled Army Ranger trapped on a hijacked prison transport plane, with a Southern accent that originates from a state that does not exist. The accent wanders. It explores. It visits several regions of the South and settles in none of them. Cage does not adjust. Cage has made his choice.

The bunny — a stuffed rabbit he is bringing home to his daughter — survives the entire film. It is, in a movie filled with explosions and Steve Buscemi, the emotional center. Cage clutches it like a man clutching his dignity. Which he is.

4. Face/Off (1997)

Cage plays a terrorist. Then Cage plays an FBI agent pretending to be a terrorist. Then the lines blur and Cage appears to be playing a man who has forgotten which one he is and has decided it doesn't matter.

John Travolta plays the same roles in reverse. Together they create something that shouldn't work and absolutely does — a film in which two actors each play both the hero and the villain and neither is ever boring. Cage's choices in this film are, technically, Travolta's choices, since he's playing Travolta playing Cage. The layers are commitment all the way down.

5. Ghost Rider (2007)

Cage plays a man whose skull catches fire and who rides a motorcycle made of flames. He prepared for this role by painting his face like a skull, sewing ancient Egyptian artifacts into his costume, and — reportedly — not speaking to anyone on set while in character.

For a superhero movie made for children.

The cockroach was for a small indie film. The skull-painting was for a $110 million blockbuster. The commitment scales with the budget. The commitment scales with nothing. The commitment is constant.

The Pattern

Every Cage performance follows the same structure:

1. Cage reads the script.
2. Cage decides what the script needs.
3. The script did not need that.
4. The film is better for it.

This is not a criticism. This is an observation. The man has made over 100 films. He has won an Academy Award. He has also been in Left Behind (2014), a faith-based action film about the Rapture in which Cage plays an airline pilot who must land a plane after half its passengers vanish. He commits to this with the same intensity he brought to Leaving Las Vegas.

The range is not the point. The consistency is the point. Cage commits. Every time. Whether the film deserves it or not.

That's the career. One sentence. He commits.

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The cockroach was real. Everything else follows from that.