A Foodie Elegy

Title: Pig

Rating: 5 Stars

On the surface, this is a slight film. A scant 92 minutes, it flies by. Nicholas Cage stars as Rob, a hermit that makes his bare living by finding the best truffles with the help of his pig. One night, people break into his rustic cabin and steal his pig. The rest of the film is his quest to retrieve it.

Over time, the complexity of the film unfolds. We learn the reason for Rob’s isolation. Some time ago, his wife Lori died. Once a renowned chef in Portland, Rob’s grief overtook him and he abandoned society. Now he sits in his cabin and listens to old tapes of his wife’s voice.

Rob sells his truffles to a young man named Amir (Alex Wolff). Amir’s act of cool sophistication belies his obvious inexperience and lack of confidence. Amir’s father, Darius (Adam Arkin), is overbearing and dismissive of Amir. Darius was similarly overbearing to his wife, who later attempted suicide and is now in a permanent vegetative state. One of their few happy memories together was a meal that Rob once prepared for them.

The theme running through all of this is loss. Rob is lost without Lori. Amir is adrift without his mother and the affections/approval of his father. When Rob recreates the meal that made Darius and his wife so happy, we see Darius’ real grief at the loss that he’s suffered.

Loss touches even the minor characters. Rob and Amir’s search for the pig leads them to a hip and busy restaurant specializing in nouvelle deconstructed cuisine. There they talk to the head chef (Finway, played by David Knell). When Finway first meets them, he is full of himself and brimming with success. It turns out that he once worked for Rob at Rob’s restaurant (where, much to his embarrassment, Rob remembers that he fired him for overcooking the pasta). As Finway brags about his success, Rob begins to probe him. Rob remembers that Finway never wanted to own a fancy restaurant serving pretentious cuisine. He just wanted to have a simple English pub serving honest food. As Rob continues to ask him about the death of his dreams (essentially deconstructing Finway), you can see Finway slowly deflate. By the time that Rob is done, Finway is just glumly staring at the table, feeling the loss of the person that he once was.

As I said, the film is spare. It was a very low budget affair, requiring that actors do their work in one or two takes. Working under these conditions seemed to bring the actors to a state of emotional honesty without mannerly baggage. Cage in particular is quiet here. With his long hair mostly covering his face, he embodies a man that ran away to suffer his pain in isolation.

Apparently the original cut was an hour longer. The distributers forced the director to make substantial cuts. You can say what you want about the money guys forcing their way into the creative process, but here it works. That much additional bloat would have greatly detracted from the core simpleness of the film’s theme. To me, it seemed to be the perfect length.

Really the only discordant note in the film was a semi Fight Club scene held in some subterranean cavern known only by those in the restaurant industry. For reasons that were not clear, Rob, by allowing his ass to get kicked, was able to glean another piece of information to aid in his search for his pig. It just seemed to be an odd choice for this film. That’s another reason why I think that the decision to cut an hour was a wise one. I have a feeling that some (most?) of that time might have been similar disconnected way stations to move the plot along. Perhaps the film maker had an idea to put Rob through some kind of labors of Hercules or Odysseus returning from Troy.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Finlay’s fancy restaurant was called Eurydice. For those of you up on your Greek mythology, you might already know that Eurydice was the wife of the musician Orpheus. One day Eurydice stepped on a viper, was bitten, and died. Lost in grief, Orpheus played so mournfully that he was encouraged to go down to the Underworld to retrieve her. He does so, but as is typical with Greek tragedies, it does not end well for him.

In their own way, most of the major characters in Pig have their own Eurydice that they are mourning and trying, anyway that they can, to keep alive.