It might just be the buzziest movie of the spring—and certainly its most meta. In what feels like a rare instance of esoteric, chutzpah-driven fan fiction green-lit by a major Hollywood studio, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” stars Nicolas Cage as an all-too-familiar version of himself.
He plays Nick Cage, that extra “k” working overtime to create any sense of daylight between character and actor. The real Cage is four times divorced, with a history of financial insolvency and a reputation for accepting roles in any woebegone screenplay that lands on his desk. The character of Nick Cage is also divorced (Sharon Horgan plays his ex-wife Olivia), also has a track record for B-movie quantity over A-list quality, and is so in debt that he’s just been locked out of the L.A. hotel where he’s been squatting. As for the character’s own history of hits and misses? Co-writer/director Tom Gormican retains the entire filmography; references to Cage’s 40-year career, including clips from “Guarding Tess” and “Con Air,” among others, litter the script.
So essentially, there is no escape. For most actors, the challenge of the craft is inhabiting the skin of somebody else. This time, it’s facing your personal demons and critics with a sword of comedy, and hoping the blade is sharp enough. Yet it’s Cage’s viscera, not anyone else’s, that spill all over “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.” It’s no wonder he hesitated before signing on to what he has called one of his most difficult parts.
Cage’s wisdom in seeing the potential in this project has borne out, as “The Unbearable Weight” has been met with near-universal hosannas. While I’m not quite on board with its most enthusiastic champions, the film is often a very funny buddy comedy, and when it’s firing on subtextual cylinders too, it functions as a deconstruction of the art of acting and cinematic storytelling in the streaming era.
The plot hinges on Cage’s begrudging acceptance, for a much-needed fee of $1 million, to attend the birthday party of a billionaire superfan and wannabe screenwriter: an olive mogul named Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), who flies the washed-up actor to his private island off Mallorca. Cage is expecting a night of inside-the-movies chitchat and grip-and-greets, a final slog through his legacy before he retires from acting. Instead, he finds himself an unwitting mole for the U.S. government—Tiffany Haddish delivers a lively turn as a CIA agent that pins a secret tracking device on Cage’s person—which believes Javi is behind a criminal drug-running empire and the abduction of a politician’s daughter.
Roles within roles within roles: Cage plays himself, sort of, and also a spy, befriending his good-natured host while secretly prodding him for actionable intelligence. The two, three and even four roles Cage inhabits here (he also plays “Nicky Cage,” a version of himself from “Wild at Heart” acting as the contemporary Cage’s hedonistic conscience) are at the heart of this movie’s wily DNA. “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” makes explicit every actor’s job, which involves seduction, deception and some degree of emotional espionage; here, through the doubling upon doubling of Cage’s persona, the effort is literal.
He also wrestles with the icons of his past, in the form of one example after another of chintzy Cage arcana. At one point, his reflection blurs with a life-size, Madame Toussoud’s-style wax figure of his character from “Face/Off,” creating the indistinguishable merger that all actors rely upon to achieve verisimilitude.
At some point—and that point may vary per viewer if it is even noticeable at all—“The Unbearable Weight” shark-jumps from amiable, old-fashioned spy caper to the very sort of shoot-em-up actioner it inherently satirizes. And amid the explosions and implausible rescue missions, it quite simply loses me. Gormican is smart enough to telegraph these tonal shifts by having his characters voice them: Between Cage, Pascal and Haddish, there is plenty of talk about how nuanced character studies descend into commercial popcorn flicks to satisfy market demand, and this movie follows its own structure slavishly. But just because it does so with a wink and a nod doesn’t make the experience feel that much more compromised.
Mostly, though, I’ll remember the not-so-quiet desperation of the first act of this movie—the nuanced character study—in which Nick Cage, practically begging to be considered for the lead in a once-in-a-lifetime gangster movie, volunteers to read for the part, and even buttonholes the director outside a café with one of his screenplay’s monologues. Nicolas Cage probably hasn’t debased himself like this in 30 years, but I have no doubt he understands the fear behind it. That’s why it works so uncomfortably well—and why it’s a moment far darker than anything that happens in a billionaire druglord’s dungeon of terror.
For more of Boca magazine’s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.
