The Heartbreaking Bummer of Unbearable Compromise | The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) Movie Review
Nicolas Cage is special. This film? Not so much… 😑
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I should not have watched this movie while out and about. It made me laugh so hard and so often that I definitively was getting noticed and getting on people’s nerves.
I was so gratified by the big swings the script took, and the metatextuality (which, in a film like Mufasa: The Boringest Lion King, is abominable and obnoxious) works for me here, akin to an Adaptation, another Nicolas Cage film.
Sadly, I think by conflating this film with Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Adaptation, I set myself up to expect a bit too much from it. I was riding high for the first 20–25 pages of the script, yet slowly but surely, elements kept creeping in that felt like studio notes or attempts to make the film more accessible or grounded.
In fact, it’s explicitly mentioned in the text, during some dialogue, as Nicolas Cage (playing Nick Cage and Nicky Cage — great, loved that) is discussing with Tiffany Hadish’s CIA Agent Vivian Etten (I’m only just now realizing that Hadish’s character and Ike Barinholtz’s character, CIA partners, both share the same last name: Etten, the screenwriter’s last name — such fun!) how to zhuzh up a character-driven adult drama with elements that would give it wider appeal, like a kidnapping, car chase, etc etc.
It was funny, until I realized that it was metatextually fessing up to why it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be after the incredible start.
This interview with The Hollywoo Reporter is a fascinating look into what potentially could have been, and what I argue probably should have been:
Let me get my feelings about Nick Cage out of the way: I adore him. I think he’s turned in some spectacular and singular performances, some in great movies (like Adaptation again, which is probably a top-25 film ever made for me) and some in not-so-great movies (like Con Air and Face/Off, which I think are fun and fine but not especially substantive). Cage is gonna Cage, and I usually love watching him do it.
He seems like the odd duck out in a family of odd ducks (you may have heard that Cage is a Coppola, though he didn’t appear in Megalopolis, which managed to put every other, single Coppola in existence onscreen, even the children who can’t speak yet). He’s weird. I don’t get the sense that ‘he’s just like me,’ but I also never get the sense he’s just like the rest of Hollywoo or the movie industry, especially other A-list actors, whatever that means. I don’t know who’s keeping these lists. Probably Harvey Weinstein — what else has he got to do?
But as you can tell from my BlueSky LiveSky review (which I terminated early, because I was so sold on the film and the script that I didn’t want to spoil it for anyone else or spoil my experience by posting constantly), I was very bullish at the outset of this thing, and I think no comedy has nailed its first act so well in years.
So, having now seen it in its entirety, and having had it not live up to the expectations and hopes I started to have for the film right away, I’m looking for why and how this happened, and I think there are concrete, deducible answers from things Cage is saying.
He claims (and I have no reason to doubt him) that he turned down this role in this film, ‘three or four times.’ And that’s a problem for this film, because I don’t think you can make it about anyone else. Maybe Robert Pattinson in 15–20 years, but living, working actors — I don’t think you can find a name or face to plug into Cage’s part that would even remotely work.
So Cage’s involvement is pretty paramount. And director Tom Gormican (no Wikipedia page!) wrote a lengthy, impassioned personal letter to Cage, who said that that gesture — and Gormican’s script — got him in the door.
“What really put the hook in me was a sequence that is no longer in the movie.” — Nicolas Cage
I honestly felt that, even watching it. There was so much potential for surreal, absurd genius and I think the suits — with Cage’s help — made a conscious decision to eschew what could have made this script and film truly special and instead mold it into a more-accessible crowd-pleaser, which by the way, I bet and think this was. It’s hilarious and good, all the way through, though it drags considerably when we get bogged down in the CIA subplots and the shoeleather of spycraft. It’s very plotty and very typical in those scenes, which is a goddamn, crying shame, because the movie is so special in other moments, particularly early on.
But somewhere along the way, whatever brilliance or genius (or just out-and-out insanity) was originally present got cut or watered down or devalued, including the sequence Cage referenced, which actually paid off the The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari setups rather than referencing it a handful of times and it amounting to nothing.
“It was a sequence where the Nick Cage character goes into a series of vignettes that are all stylized in the German expressionism of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. So there was a sequence in black and white that was a Gone in 60 Seconds race in a Mustang, there was the Leaving Las Vegas character in a hotel room. It was fun to make and cool to look at. Ultimately, the studio decided it was too far out for audiences.”
Sure. Too far out for a general audience. Adaptation (a good comp) was filmed on a reported $19 million budget and grossed $32.8 million. That’s close enough to the margins that it’s debatable whether it turned a profit in its theatrical run (though that’s argued about literally every movie now, because the accounting in Hollywoo is as corrupt and broken a system as the business world has to offer).
But I think Adaptation is a fair watermark for what this film could have accomplished or achieved if it had stuck to its guns. Adaptation’s brilliance is based on a truly-special — I would argue genius — metatextual script by Charlie Kaufman about his process of adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, and a transcendent pair of performances from Nicolas Cage as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin brother, Donald.
Ultimately, Unbearable Weight is like Adaptation-lite, like if Spike Jonze had caved to whatever studio execs and thrown in some action set pieces to please them (and maybe he did! there are action sequences in that film, but they feel so earned and organic and essential that I can’t imagine they were studio notes).
Cage’s intention was to not watch the Unbearable Weight, but was then forced to in his role as producer, and forced to do more than just that, too. I’d encourage you to put on your high-school or college reading comprehension hats and look closely at this next quote.
“So let me go on record now: I have had to watch the movie two or three times because I had to put my other hat on — as a producer — because I got caught between the studio and the director. I think both sides ultimately contributed equally to making the best final result we could. But I had to come in and say [to the studio], “Look, I understand you’re trying to get a certain length to the picture, but you’re losing a lot of the flavor Tom brought.” I also had to say, “I think some of these scenes are not landing, Tom.” Both sides were coming in with valid points, and I had to be a mediator.”
So, despite the film’s strong start, my judgment or hunch is that — with Cage diplomatically complaining about his go-between producer role and the sky-high early peaks of the script — the movie I would have loved was in there somewhere, and instead of getting a fully-realized version of what that could have been, it’s a very watered down version that (Netflix hopes) will be more widely popular and easy to appreciate.
The above 1-star reviews are what you’re trying to avoid. Adaptation was too smart, too challenging, too surreal, too indefinable and too incisive to connect with that wide of an audience.
Any film that is good enough or smart enough to say something worthwhile is losing potential eyeballs and ticket sales every rung of the ladder it climbs, shedding possible fans the whole way.
Interestingly, I do think that David Fincher’s The Killer has more or less the same ‘problem,’ if you want to call it that (Failing to live up to your potential is a problem, by the way, or I’ve been lied to by every teacher or parent-surrogate I’ve met in the last 40 years). It’s just my suspicion, judgement, hunch — whatever. But I suspect that the Netflix process and marketing calculus took two films that could have been artistic statements of real merit and sanded the rough edges off of them, threw in some crowd-pleasing action or thrills and made sure that neither film climbed far enough up the Quality/Art ladder to lose a wide audience. Whatever Netflix considers to be sufficiently wide.
So it is with great regret and sober sorrow that I report to you that The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not the film I hoped and projected it to be early on, and I think we know why.
Watch it, though! It’s good and fun and smart in ways that other movies aren’t. But know that there’s also a real, substantive, meritorious film buried in here somewhere, underneath all the Netflix hedges to keep viewers from falling off their content ladder. I mourn for that film, which could have been great, and it mutes my celebration of this film, which was not great.
Nicolas Cage was consistently great, though, and props to Pedro Pascal who, despite being catastrophically overexposed, in my humble opinion, is so fresh and fun and exciting in this role, and really crushes it in this movie. While he may not be as essential and singular as Nick Cage, in a sense, this movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him, either.
And it does work! Just not quite like how I’d hoped it would, or how I believe it could have, if courage and vision and creative integrity had beat out quatroquadrantphilia (I’m coining that? I doubt anyone’s going to challenge me for it, though…).
Sigh.
So it goes.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is still fun, good, worthwhile, but if it whets your appetite for the kind of meta surrealism and absurdity the film toyed with in its first act, I’d urge you to seek out Adaptation and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, similar projects that I don’t feel made the same compromises and corner-cutting moves that this movie ultimately did. There’s better, less-dilute art out there. And I’m starting to think that if it does go up on Netflix, it almost surely won’t be challenging or artistically daring in the way those better works are.
