SPOILERS for the movie in here.
Food is such a fraught, weighty thing; it can be political and it can recall all these memories and mean so much to people. In Nicolas Cage’s new vehicle “Pig” these kinds of themes are explored. Cage’s character Robin Feld, an ex-chef who now lives a solitary life in the woods, has a line maybe two-thirds of the way through that really encompasses everything the movie is: “You only get so many things to care about.”
Most of the rest of it is just this tour through the strange and seedy world of the restaurant underground. It’s a curious backdrop for a film and endears me to it – this wholly singular kind of plot and setting. There’s some pretty wild and ugly things that go on like an underground fight club for cooks? I want to know how much this is based on real life. Something tells me there has to have been some real-world connection there. Then you get the more artificial side of the actual front-facing restaurants, so fussy and over-prepared that there’s nothing real in it. All of it really ends up showing you why someone might end up leaving that life.
But he’s got to go back in though. Someone’s taken his truffle pig. He and Alex Wolff’s character Amir, who is trying to start his own business in this crazy culinary underworld, end up on a tour of said underworld, as Robin tries to figure out what the hell happened.
It’s all very moody and somber and the movie doesn’t spell anything out for you. Cage is remarkably restrained and his killer stare does a lot of the work as he chooses his words very carefully. When he does speak it’s like a thunderbolt. You fucking pay attention. Wolff’s character talks tough but he also talks too much and betrays that maybe he’s not as worldly as he wants to be.
Robin goes through this whole thing with a cloud of impending violence over him. But the violence never really comes. There’s one scene with the fight club I mentioned where you get some pretty grisly stuff comparative to the rest of the film, but everything else tends toward the quiet. One of the best scenes is when he visits his old restaurant – now a bakery – and has this really short, tender exchange with the lady who’s taken it over. He gets some baguettes. It doesn’t sound exciting but like I said – food has layers and layers of meaning for people.
Eventually he finds out who took the pig – Amir’s father, played by Adam Arkin, who is now some kind of big kingpin in the Oregon culinary world. Arkin apparently ordered the pig stolen to do what his son was doing selling the truffles but even better. It’s pure capitalistic bloodthirst. No real regard for the humanity. Robin and this guy commiserate just slightly on the fact that they’ve both lost their wives. In an earlier scene Amir had said Robin once cooked a meal for his (Amir’s) parents that they talked about for years after. Unlike your usual “who took my (x)” Taken/John Wick sort of film, there’s no big beat-em-up action scene. Instead Robin cooks the same meal as he’d done years before – he says he remembers “every meal he’s ever cooked, every person he’s ever served.”
Killing the other guy with compassion. Reminding him of what was lost and what matters in life. It’s genius. I wish I had thought of it. The underlying theme speaks to me of the human connection that really matters more than anything else. It sounds like something obvious, but stripped to its core with how the movie presents it, and especially with the raw, quiet ending - it comes off profound. At the end of the day, by the time the last line tells you Robin's deceased wife had given him the pig as a gift and that's why he's so hellbent on getting it back - you kinda guessed that by then, but the emotional effect is as resonant and heavy as an obelisk anyway.
The whole thing really comes out to a grand piece of film. It’s quiet but the themes and ways these characters are unveiled comes out to something that the greatest movies are all about. Mightily human and vulnerable stuff. The reason you go to the movies. Don't miss it.