Nicolas Cage as Red in “Mandy”
“MANDY” My rating: A- (Hulu)
121 minutes | No MPAA rating
“SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL”My rating: B- (Hulu)
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
The prevailing wisdom is that Nicolas Cage will make any movie if the price is right, that you needn’t send him the script until the check has cleared.
And looking at his output over the last decade, that summation seems fairly accurate.
For every noteworthy title on his resume (“Pig,” “Dream Scenario,” “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”) there are a half dozen half-baked and utterly forgettable genre flicks (mostly revenge melodramas) that in a previous era would have gone straight to video.
Today, of course, they go straight to streaming.
If the quality of Cage’s output is questionable, the quantity is staggering. Since 2015 he has racked up more than 40 film credits, usually as the lead actor. This would be regarded as Herculean for any performer, but Cage’s batting average is further enhanced by the fact that for nearly three of those years Hollywood was in a covid shutdown.
Now I cannot claim to have seen all of Cage’s recent work (life’s too short, you know?) but I’ve been doing some surfing around the streaming services and have stumbled across a couple of titles that previously eluded me.
First off, from 2018, is “Mandy,” a revenge melodrama (check) that practically pulsates with human agony (thanks to Cage’s performance) while radiating a psychological/surreal intensity that is simultaneously seductive and repellant.
This might be great filmmaking. It might be trash. I could make a case for either.
The real star here is writer/director Panos Cosmatos, who creates a nightmare world rooted in the eccentric weirdness of Nicolas Winding Refn and accented with the surreal beauty of Lars Van Trier’s “Melancholia.” There’s even a nod here to Bergman’s “Persona.”
“Mandy” is crammed with laughable pulp fiction tropes, but even when it tosses in the odd playful moment you’ll find yourself a prisoner of its somber intensity.
The setup: Lumberjack Red (Nicolas Cage) lives in a comfy cabin in the north woods with his squeeze Mandy (Andrea Riseborough),
Linus Roache is Jeremiah, the bonkers head of a religious cult (he’s positively Koresh-ian) whose followers think only of satisfying his psychological and sexual needs.
Jeremiah spots Mandy on one of his drives and orders his minions to kidnap her. This they do, but not before torturing Red, whom they leave for dead.
They should have made sure.
There’s stuff going on here that just shouldn’t work…like a gang of bikers (are they human or demons?) whose costuming makes them look like the love children of “Hellraiser’s” Pinhead and “Pulp Fiction’s” Geek.
As the batshit crazy Jeremiah, Roache (who spent several seasons as a prosecutor on “Law & Order”) gets to dig into some mind-blowing bloviatory dialogue. There’s a touch of Robert Mitchum’s killer preacher from “Night of the Hunter.” It’s totally unlike anything he’s ever done.
And that’s another unexpected thing. On top of its visual/aural splendors, “Mandy” has been fabulously well acted.
The great Bill Duke makes a rare on-screen appearance as Red’s buddy, who keeps an impressive cache of weaponry in his mobile home. And as cult members the veteran actors Olwen Fouere, Richard Brake, Line Pallet and Ned Dennehy (you may not know the names but you’ll recognize the faces) give remarkably nuanced and unnerving performances.
But holding it all together is Cage. It’s a pitiless performance…in one harrowing segment the camera zooms in on Red’s bloodied features and stays there for what seems like minutes as he screams in emotional (the love of his life has been taken) and physical pain (he awakens to find he’s been bundled in barbed wire and one hand has been nailed to the floor).
“Mandy” is exhausting and draining, but I’d happily watch it again.
Nicolas Cage as The Passenger in “Sympathy for the Devil”
Then there’s “Sympathy for the Devil,” a 2023 drama in which Cage appears as a gun-toting killer who carjacks a suburban dad and forces him to cruise around nighttime Las Vegas.
When we first see Cage’s character (identified in the credits as The Passenger) he’s like the cartoon embodiment of Sin City’s underbelly. With hair dyed to match the day-glo maroon of his tuxedo jacket and a Mephistophelean goatee, the guy comes off like a cheesy stage magician who might keep a dead hooker in his car trunk. (He even forces his victim to participate in a card trick.)
The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) has just pulled into a hospital parking garage. His wife is upstairs giving birth to their second child — all he wants is to be at her side.
But, no, he’s forced at gunpoint to drive his captor out of town for…well, let’s not ruin anything.
Yuval Adler’s film is basically a claustrophobic two-hander. There are encounters with other citizens — an unfortunate cop, the terrified travelers at an all-night highway diner — must mostly it’s just these two guys in a car surrounded by the desert night.
Was the kidnapping arbitrary? A wrong place, wrong time thing? The Passenger is a smirking, taunting presence. The Driver claims there’s been a mistake, that he’s just a working jerk.
But maybe there’s something in the pasts of these two that made this evening inevitable?
Luke Paradise’s screenplay manages a magic trick of its own, turning the Passenger over time from a holy terror to a man with a painful past…which is how we end up sympathizing with this particular devil. (Viewers familiar with Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” may guess where this is all going.)
Thanks to Cage it almost works. The Passenger is a preposterous character who really doesn’t wash, psychologically speaking. But watching Cage tear into this material it almost doesn’t matter. The guy is out there sweating to turn straw into gold. In the end he turns that straw into brass, but it’s still a wonder to behold.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 