It’s hard to say this without sounding a little self-satisfied, but halfway into “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” I guessed the exact way the last two scenes would play out. I was not happy at my prediction, though. In that prediction I realised that screenwriters Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten give in to some of their worst instincts in imagining what a metatextual Nicolas Cage comedy looks like. And it feels curmudgeonly to lead with this. So much of the film (directed by Gormican) has a sunny and laid-back vibe that almost tricks you into reading its empty harmlessness as charming congeniality. Although mustering up actual antipathy towards the film would be overzealous, there’s very little of worth here.
One could imagine the back and forth between Gormican and Etten in the lead up to the film sounding something like this:
Person 1: What if Nicolas Cage stars in a movie about the actor Nicolas Cage who feels like his career is on the skids and gets involved with a rich fan who’s obsessed with him?
Person 2: That would be dope. Wait, what if the movie also slowly lets Nicolas Cage act in a 1990-s type of Nicolas Cage movie?
Person 1: And what if they end writing a movie for him to star in, while in this movie where he’s starring as himself?
Person 2: Hahaha, that is funny.
It’s the kind of joke that amuses for the escalating ridiculousness it sets up. It’s not the kind of joke with a punchline that gives some resolution or offers something novel to work with. The kind of jokes that work as the hook for an entire movie do so because a punchline pushes the meaning of the joke into something that has the shape of a story. But beyond the initial trippy meta quality of the joke, “Unbearable Weight” doesn’t know what to do with itself as a movie. Everything doesn’t need to be a movie. Here is yet another movie where the impetus for it seems to end at conceptualisation rather than an actual idea of what movies can be that moves beyond the hook.
All that might be funny in the movie is left at that hook. Few of its major comedic beats move beyond the cadence, “Hey, Nicolas Cage in Face/Off? That’s wild. Oh, did you know he did The Croods 2? Yeah, wow.” Tasked with building an actual plot to carry that approach to its humour, though, leaves the writing team floundering. You can feel them piecing together the bare bones of the operation. In it, a washed-up version of Cage agrees to attend a rich fan’s birthday party and travels to Italy for an easy million-dollar payday. Unfortunately, the fan is under investigation by the CIA for kidnapping the Catalonian president’s daughter. When Cage becomes unwittingly recruited to do groundwork for them, he struggles to navigate his building friendship with the earnest fan (Pedro Pascal as Javi Gutierrez, billionaire and budding film writer, giving the most meaningful performance in the film even as he’s clearly stunted by the limits of the character), and his worry that he may helping a murderer.
The plot throws the skeleton of stakes at us, but it’s so jumbled in its approach to finding humour that it wastes the metatextual possibility of its hook. In theory, it is a movie about movies. Nic Cage is constantly talking about movies, and not just his movies. There’s motif centred on “Paddington 2”, there’s another about “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. When Cage and Javi actually begin to get along, with Javi’s earnest devotion pulling Cage out of a cynical attitude to his work, he begins to doubt the CIA’s intel. But, with a flimsy conflict with his daughter used as a bargaining chip, Cage agrees to stay beyond the birthday as he pretends to be interested in working on a film written by Javi. And so, the middle portion of the film becomes a series of escalating “hey, how about this movie? No how about that movie?” references that echo the kind of pride a film-enthusiast might get from citing some Hollywood trivia but going very little beyond that. The idea is squandered. Movies need more than a concept to represent the scope of what they can do. And for a movie that ostensibly cares about movies as a concept, “Unbearable Weight” gives as shallow reading of them as it does about the appeal of Nicolas Cage.
The opening section, where Cage finds himself playing an exaggerated version of himself complete with a recurring alter-ego version of himself from his 1990 “Wild at Heart” persona feels tedious very soon. It wants us to laugh at his desperation, but it’s also unwilling to go the full extent of making him truly cringeworthy or flawed in that desperation. It throws us the possibility of him exhausting his family – his teen daughter, and his divorced wife. But it also wants to not make him too unpleasant. By the time we get to Javi, the repetitive adorative perspective without any depth begins to feel pointless in the wake of the possibility of something really perceptive in self-assessing its star and his field. There’s so much potential.
Movies have thrived by turning an ironic gaze on themselves. Like Truffaut riffing and gently ribbing himself and peers in “Day for Night”, Wilder considering the sad grotesquery of the industry in “Sunset Boulevard”, or Scorsese’s love-letter to the technical aptitude of cinema’s first few decades in “The Aviator”. Even Cage has been part of similarly complex meta-films like his work in Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation”. Movies are a haven for the possible and that self-assessment can prove fertile. But so much of “Unbearable Weight” ends at the conceptualisation. It’s so superficial as a movie about movie, its idea doesn’t have a central point. It’s just a mildly funny set up to what could be a joke, told again and again. It’s hard to think of it in an ill-way. It’s too congenial, but it’s also very much nothing. Even its attempt at humour feels too placid to register.
Each new plot feels like a case of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Nothing feels like it has much weight, even the transnational crisis of the kidnapping at its centre. Visually, the glossy sheen as Javi and Nic traipse through Italy, just makes everything feel even more indistinct. When it veers into action territory, none of its approach to action feel as savvy as the best Cage thrillers. And it doesn’t give us the possibility of using Cage in the best of his range. Nicolas is Cage has always been compelling both for how he can play the hero that wins as much as for being the character who loses. Cage is good at playing losers. And this movie can’t bear to ever let him lose. It’s not only that he has to win it’s that the film can’t bear to really not let him have the last laugh. And for many of us, we recognise the range and excellence of Nicolas Cage, where the question of what his best film is offers as diverse a range as “Moonstruck” to “Leaving Las Vegas” to “Face/Off” to “Adaptation” to “Pig”. The range is there. We don’t need to be convinced that Nicolas Cage is excellent, so the recurring self-reflexive need the film seems to have to prove to us that he is feels like a tiresome disservice to him. It doesn’t trust in his talent enough to offer real depth in analysing him. Instead, it’s just a superficial engagement with what he can do, offering very little ultimately. All of that possibility and yet so little imagination. The unbearable weight of being dull, maybe.
