My What Long Legs You Have
Light spoilers ahead for Longlegs.
The last five years have been rough for long-time Nic Cage fans.
This may seem counter-intuitive. After all, the rest of the world has finally caught up with those of us who have loved the guy as an actor since Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or Face/Off or even Vampire's Kiss. He's starring in thoughtful and well-constructed movies where his work is being centered, and people are talking seriously about his talents!
In his recent come back, Nic Cage has been getting roles written explicitly for him, designed for the explosive, camp, Brechtian alienation master in all his comedic glory (Renfield, Willy's Wonderland). Or they've been giving him meaty roles designed to let him "really act" in the "naturalistic" Actors' Studio style so preferred by American screen actors since the seventies (Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent).
When a movie is written and designed with a Nic Cage role at its center, he can fill it well. But Nic Cage is the Hollywood equivalent of the Kool-Aid Man; if you build your classroom with a Kool-Aid Man size hole in the fourth wall, his entry is just...walking in.
At his best, Nic Cage explodes a role. His seemingly out-of-place emotive size and volume threaten to shatter a picture, destroying the hard built and ideological "realism" effect of Hollywood production when he first appears, only to tell so consistent a character story as to weave it back together by the end. Cage is a very good listener with other actors, he's not doing his thing alone. He punctuates a movie but he doesn't take it over, he reveals, comments on but does not undermine the melodrama and absurdity of the modern narrative apparatus. He often stars in ensembles or at least two-handers–he needs to bounce off someone–and at his best he helps pull great performances from the actors he's working alongside.
In the last few years, while other people get to marvel at his skills in films designed explicitly around those skills, long time stans like myself haven't gotten to enjoy the subversive chaos that makes him one of the greatest actors to ever be produced by/against the studio system. He gets put in roles where he carries the picture alone, where his energy is already anticipated and funneled toward the movie's marketing and structure.
To be clear, I'm happy for him: he deserves the accolades and respect he's finally receiving for his craft, even if sometimes those accolades feel a little backhanded or condescending. He's producing these movies and by all accounts they appear to be making him happy. And this isn't some hipster plea: Cage may not have been taken seriously by the critics, but he had leading roles in massive budget movies through the 90s and 00s, our "club" of fans includes some of the most powerful producers and studio heads in history, as well as a large portion of moviegoers across decades.
Still, I was hopeful that his appearance in the new and widely-buzzed indie horror hit Longlegs would be a return to form. But while he brings some truly deep terror as the titular Longlegs (this is not a spoiler, it is revealed in the opening credits that he will be playing the serial killer), the role was clearly written for his bombast, and so, it's not quite as pleasurable or surprising as it could be.
It doesn't really matter though, because Longlegs is scary as fuck.