In “Pig”, Nicolas Cage plays an ascetic looking for a stolen pig, giving the audience touching moments and lessons in being human.

Pig ‘s idea sounds really crazy. A truffle picker (Cage) lives in the forest and raises a pig that specializes in finding mushrooms. One day, the pig was stolen right from the house. The old man decided to find it again. It’s the kind of script where Hollywood producers are ready to laugh in the writer’s face and throw the manuscript out the window. But it’s also the kind of script that only Nicolas Cage could handle.

Rare Hollywood script

Black truffle mushrooms are as expensive as gold, what the world calls “black diamonds on the table” and sometimes a fortune can only buy a few kilograms. This mushroom is a bridge between the wild and the city, found under rotting moss and grass by a grumpy pig and a slovenly old man.
From there, the truffles find their way to the most luxurious restaurants in the city, where diners are indifferent to the cliché about the combination of traditional ingredients and modern crystallization.

The expensive mushrooms are what took away Rob’s (Nicolas Cage) beloved pig. Seemingly like a version of John Wick, Pig turns out to be a parable about connectivity, the finiteness of human life and the power of cuisine.

In the film, we encounter portraits of two completely different characters. A Rob lives in seclusion like a Taoist monk, giving up almost all material comforts to go into the forest to find mushrooms. He spent his days wandering through the wet, muddy forest canopy, sleeping in a rickety wooden cabin with a pig for company.

Rob’s customer, Amir (Alex Wolf) is a well-dressed president, drives a luxury car, has a good watch, and enjoys a fortune from a source of goods harvested deep in the forest by a doting old man.

Behind that opposition is the journey of letting go of attachments. For Rob, it is the pain and memories of his wife of 15 years. Amir is the spiteful father-son relationship and the ghost of the mother. The absence of women makes men lose their way, one way or another. At the end of the film, each character finds a way to close a very long chapter in their lives and accept living with reality, no matter how bitter.

Most movies will greedily try to tell all the details of the characters’ past through flashbacks, dialogue, illustrations…

With Pig , the audience can easily miss a few important details because they are scattered, intentionally or unintentionally, mixed in with the slow footsteps of Rob returning to the city he left 15 years ago. .

The strange and unique of Nicolas Cage

The film’s pace is slow, the script doesn’t have too many climaxes, the film can easily frustrate those who are waiting for an intense revenge work like Nobody. Fortunately, when needed, Nicolas Cage suddenly shines.

The simple realism in Pig is expressed effectively mainly by the acting of the actor who is famous for his fluctuating performance. At the same time as Cage, perhaps only Willem Dafoe could bring the same feeling of torment and asceticism if the role of Rob was given to someone else.

The role of the old man looking for black mushrooms in the film reminds people of the father and son who left the city to live wild in the forest of Gaia – a South African film that also has very beautiful shooting angles, or the image of Pubba’s father in the series. Netflix’s Sweet Tooth.

These are the men who left the industrial achievements of humanity, refused material comforts, sank into the deep forests and lost themselves in the wilderness, returning to their origins. The only difference is that Pig ‘s Rob is as vague and abstract as the movie itself, with the only dream of finding the pig again even though he was beaten until his face was bruised.

Only Cage could turn an innocuous, banal, lifeless script into something memorable with even a few moments of ecstasy – touching on magic.

As someone once said, watching Nicolas Cage movies is like playing the lottery. Sometimes you have fun moments. Other times you curse the present, wishing you could go back to the past. A “weird” actor like Nicolas Cage, after a series of films ranging from excellent to terrible, finally turned director Michael Sarnoski’s debut film into an emotional discourse.

Referring to the effectiveness of Pig , we cannot forget the contribution of young talent Alex Wolf. Since Hereditary, the actor born in 1997 has stepped away from teenage roles to become an adult on screen. Young, neatly groomed hair, sunglasses, watch, good car, the first impression of Amir is the opposite of tattered Rob.

The deeper we go, the more we realize in that young man his own feelings, ambitions to be affirmed, to be noticed, to be listened to, and the pain of loss. Along with Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolf makes for a strange and interesting on-screen duo.

In a year where COVID-19 has ruined the dreams and plans of millions, Pig strangely, in a story that seems like a joke but isn’t, reminds us of Buddhist-inspired mindful living. Be clear about what is happening, less is more, live meaningfully as Rob calmly said: “We don’t have too many things to really care about.”