In The Unbearable Weight of Great Talent, Nicolas Cage plays himself, failure, success, and all current obsessions.

Nicolas Cage knows his career is an unclassifiable combination. So much so that I repeat it over and over in The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent Tom Gormican. “I’m not a star and sometimes I doubt that I’m an actor,” he says. And he does this throughout the movie. in extravagant scenes and an increasingly sophisticated sense of the absurd. But the film, one of the best bets on the metanarrative of the last three years, is remarkably solid.

The screenplay, co-written by the director and Kevin Atten, usesa trick of light mockery to clarify more complex ideas. Nicolas Cage, who isn’t shy about making fun of himself, is also a mirror of cinema as a business. Twisted, seasoned with bad taste and especially, in the eloquent version of Cage, as the central element of the room. When is cinema a refractive box of culture?

The film easily answers this question. That’s always the case, insists Cage, who plays the role of his alter ego of satire, but also a dark vision of failure. For an actor, his career is a territory of ups and downs. At the same time it is a journey through his passions and obsessions. Gormican includes Cage’s condition as a rarity, as an excluded, and also as a fringe movie subject.

But at the same time, he illuminates again and again the derisive debate about his performances, triumphs and failures. The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent build a film version in the manner of the great Roman arenas. “We are a joke,” Cage insists, oblivious to the point. that his whole career seems to be based on absurdity and absurdity.

The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent it is an intellectual framework that uses its best weapon in a premise that plays with cinema as a setting. Cage acting up to live out his version? Or is it really an actor who has surrendered to an insistent point of identity? The film doesn’t make this clear, but uses the connection to ambivalence as something more powerful.

The film is also a persistent, well-constructed celebration of the notion of cinema as a world that stands on its own references. Lana Wachowski failed at Matrix Resurrections while brooding over the codes of the Matrix Saga universe. Even through the link in its purest form. But Gormican triumphs. His film is an exaggerated journey, sometimes bordering on the chaotic, through cinema as a mirror of something deeper and more idiosyncratic.

In fact, much of the movie is poking fun at, brooding over, and digging into fame and glory. And if that wasn’t enough, he delves into the idea of ​​relevance at a time when fame is within reach of social media audiences. At various points in the film, Gormican explores the state of recognition of power. But he also does one more thing: he pokes fun at that excellence through the most enigmatic actor of his generation.

Cage who plays Cage in Cage’s world

From the opening scenes, in which a very young viewer expresses her admiration for Nicolas Cage, to the final part, which is replete with various references. The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent remember in advance that the movie is fake, it has no value other than its cost or instant fame. Or so it seems clear as the plot asks itself outlandish questions. “He’s a legend,” he says of Cage with sincere and enthusiastic adoration. As he does so, footage from the 1997 film Con Air flashes across the screen.

The next scene follows the actor playing himself as he walks down Sunset Boulevard. Nic Cage – the character – looks tired and nervous. But in the end, “he’s a star,” as he mutters when he’s in a bad mood. He is also aware of his legendary qualities. Come for less, with all sorts of issues and a weird filmography in tow. “But a legend, after all,” says the actor, who makes fun of his own life on and off the cameras.

Plot extravagance is another example of Hollywood venturing into a strange trend. One that lets you explore your lowest points with humor as well analyzes the world of cinema from a radical point of view. The setting is fictional, a paradox perhaps too broad to capture the meaning of spectacular cinema. But even so, he stands by the fact that the film raises questions that Hollywood usually does not like to touch.

The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent this is the proudest mockery, straight and twisted about the Hollywood industry. A mechanism that creates the identity of modern cinema, but especially the faces that represent it. And he does this with a simple technique: mocking one of his disgraced heroes.

Mirror dance with Nicolas Cage at the helm

Nicolas Cage has come a long way in his filmography and personal life. And the Gormican film shows this. But it also does something else. Fill the film with metanarrative threads which make it a magnificent and well-executed rarity. Cage plays a failed actor who goes out on a date, a director (director David Gordon Green, in a surprise cameo) at Château Marmont in Hollywood, that redoubt of stars that is part of the mythology of the seventh art.

His personal life is a chaotic amalgamation of minor disasters, like Cage’s, and major financial ruin, as Cage’s is from time to time. To complete his idea, this legendary man, now a loser, is looking for the role of his life. A cliché in the world of Hollywood that the film takes to a new level. And it surprises with its precise performance, the search for humor that is not humor.