Unconstructed Scallops

Living in the unincorporated wilderness of Oregon, Rob (Nicolas Cage) makes money foraging for truffles, a valued commodity among the cosmopolitan restauranteurs of Portland. When Rob's sole companion, a reliable truffle pig, is stolen in the dead of night, he enlists his millennial buyer Amir (Alex Wolff) to help him find it.

When it was first announced in the fall of 2019 that Nicolas Cage had been cast in a dramatic saga concerning one man's search for his favored animal, the snickering that what would emerge would be more or less "John Wick, but with a pig" was almost unavoidable. Through a combination of poor financial decision-making as well as his own creative eccentricities, Cage has certainly found himself headlining many a low-budget, gonzo genre flick, further cultivating his reputation as the United States' premiere cult actor. Even the trailers for Pig, a first feature for writer-director Michael Sarnoski, are calibrated to play up an understated, ominous intensity while obscuring the actual plot of the film, a clear and cynical attempt to ply both Cage's infamy and the broader appetite among a new generation of cineastes for middlebrow fusions of pulp and arthouse.

I'm teeing my reader up for an obvious misdirection here, because to a certain extent, Pig is absolutely a film that could be set in "the John Wick universe." As Rob, Cage never bandies around a firearm collecting headshots, but this is nonetheless one of those archetypal "lone gun" adventures into seedy urban underbellies. More pertinent to contemporary trends in the American genre film, Sarnoski certainly aims for a kind of controlled unreality where the high contrast dichotomies of light and shadow, wealth and poverty, order and perversion that characterized the classic noir have given way to new forms of metropolitan menagerie. We follow Rob, revealed to be a once legendary chef, through the black market of locally sourced food stuffs, down a melancholy rabbit hole of underground bum fights and conceptual eateries where the servers and chefs dress and act like the brainwashed victims of a futuristic cult. It's critical to not get too distracted by the overall melancholy of Pig, its lack of orientation towards action, and the relative absence of moments of explosive performance we've come to associate with Cage. At the end of the day, Pig has much more spiritual kinship with the genre-bending, pulp-arthouse middlebrow than it does with an earnest work about food or cooking.

What ostensibly sets Pig apart is its preciousness, but this proves compensatory. Sarnoski can contrive some superficially interesting scenarios, but he fails to thread an organic sense of his characters' motivations. On paper, you can rationalize the decisions of the characters, plot how we get from point A to point B of our procedure for Rob finding his pig. But in execution, Sarnoski relies too much on the ephemera of his heightened reality, asking us to take too much at face value. It's not enough, for instance, that Rob simply be a legendary chef. He also needs to have superpowers of a kind, like invulnerability or a photographic memory; the kinds of things that middlebrow film school hacks think is cool because they carry an affectation of the archetypal, but ultimately serve to let them off the hook for lazy, self-indulgent writing. There is very little in the way of complication to Pig, which means that there's no dramatic tension. The story simply unfolds in a naive fashion that Sarnoski's ideas are never ingenious enough to earn, Cage shambling through another mediocre performance.

If there's one point of interest in Pig, it comes out of Rob's development as a character. Sarnoski's script is too understated for its own good, but one definitely perceives at least the bare bones of a story about a deeply alienated individual whose forced mission back to his old stomping grounds resolves in personal catharsis. There's an almost Randian objectivist streak to Rob, who at one point tells a former cook-turned-sellout chef, "They don't exist. Not the critics, not the customers." As an archetypal figure, Rob represents the chef as artist, one whose pursuit of his craft requires uncompromising commitment to the self. As he tells the same chef - who sold out his dream of owning a pub in Portland to find stability in the city's gentrifying food service market - with each sacrifice to convenience and compromise, with each ascent to the collective Other, the chef as artist loses himself, becomes a ghost. This, however, is contrasted earlier by Edgar (Darius Pierce), a sort of go-between and ringleader for Portland's food service black market, who tells Rob that he himself is a ghost, that he never really existed. Traumatized by the death of his partner some fifteen years beforehand, Rob attempted to escape by isolating himself, his pig functioning more as an emotional support animal for a man who attests that he could do just as well foraging for truffles on his own. Hence, the theft of Rob's pig represents a recurrence of his trauma, and this forces a confrontation with his own loss of self for the polar opposite reason as the sold out chef.

The climax of the film is effectively oriented around Rob's ability to remember the deep ties that a good meal can have to emotional memory. Each of the film's three acts is named after a dish served in the story. Each dish, in turn, is dramatically tied into an emotional memory. This culminates in the story's climax, with Rob deciding to serve, rather than to fight, the story's main antagonist, who turns out to be Amir's own father Darius (Adam Arkin). In remembering the humanity of others, Rob may reclaim his own humanity, restoring his own existence by recognizing the mutually-dependent existence of his art's audience.

The thing is, though, that like the "deconstructed scallops" served at the high concept restaurant where the sellout chef works, Pig is entirely too conceptual. If there's a main difference between it and other "food porn," like Jon Favreau's Chef or John Wells and Steven Knights' Burnt, it's that for all the hyperbole and sentimentalism of those more mainstream films, they at least tie their drama to the economy, culture, and work of food service. Pig might have been both interesting and good - as opposed to just, in part, conceptually interesting - as a more ethnographic exploration of the relationship between the urban restaurant and the rural hinterlands from which "wild" ingredients are extracted. The pieces of a totally unique drama are all here, from the pipeline of relatively unregulated commodities, to the commensurate exploitation of labor, to the mystifying barrier between high and low culture. Sarnoski may touch upon these themes, but Pig ultimately becomes an exercise in a far less original kind of imaginary. It becomes a frictionless experience because there's nothing backing up the emotional appeal or points of conceptual interest. The filmmakers didn't actually care about food, or the work that goes into it, or the complex pathways from soil to plate. Rather, "food" itself becomes an affectation, a cliche point of reference indicating "that which makes us feel good." Like the scallops dish, Pig is not so much "deconstructed" as un-constructed. It is a plate of ingredients.