Caged Wisdom The Rock (1996)

Because TIFF is hosting an ongoing late night series dedicated to him this season, and because we believe (actually) that he might be the essential American actor of the last 30 years, we present Caged Wisdom, a series of essays about the films of Nicolas Cage. 

“Let’s hope this elevates their thinking,” says Ed Harris to his dead wife’s grave in the opening minutes of one of the stupider movies ever made.

Harris is talking about his plot to infiltrate Alcatraz, hold a bunch of tourists hostage, and then point rockets loaded with something called “deadly VX gas” at the city of San Francisco in order to leverage millions of dollars from the U.S. government. But he might as well be talking about the film itself. Or rather, he might as well be talking on its behalf, as if the movie itself were working him like a puppet to tell you, the innocent bystander, to wake up. Your thinking’s about to get elevated. Welcome to The Rock.

Harris plays a U.S. brigadier general, leading a team of domestic terrorists who feel they’ve been betrayed by their government. They see themselves as Patriots. When you see The Rock and you’re 10 years old, this all seems really heavy. “This what adult movies are like,” you tell yourself, and you feel like you’re getting away with something watching it, like the time your dad let you watch Terminator 2 when you were in grade two.

The thing that might make The Rock “brilliant” though—“brilliant” in that diabolical way, like brilliant in the way nicotine is brilliant—is how it flatters this sense of importance. And it manages to do so while also essentially being a cartoon, the next step towards Bay’s inevitable turn to the Transformers franchise, his definitive vehicle (pardon the pun) for brain-dead blockbusting. The Rock works diligently to elevate its exasperating pyrotechnics. Bay has never being able to nail high-mindedness, though. (Remember when the KKK raid scene at the top of Bad Boys II said absolutely about nothing contemporary race relations in America?) As a director and thinker of films, his trade isn’t elevation, but rather escalation—the one-upping his own explosions and car crashes and “pew pew pew” sound effects scene by scene, film by film.

As is often the case, Bay the zillionaire moron gets the last laugh. By no fault of his own, The Rock has been elevated. As the pivot that marks star Nicolas Cage’s mid-career reinvention, the film that saw him parlaying his Oscar-winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas into full-bird action stardom, The Rock has become an essential text in the study of Cage’s career—which is really too bad. Why couldn’t Cage have just launched straight into 1997, landing sure-footed with top billing in the unparalleled action flick one-two of Con Air and Face/Off? Well, without the success of The Rock (in excess of U.S. $335 million worldwide), there may not have been a Con Air or a Face/Off. And imagining a world without Face/Off? Well, it’s almost too much to bear.

If nothing else, The Rock is a necessary evil.

For Bay, The Rock proved to be just as crucial a career lynchpin as it did for Cage. His first massively budgeted film after 1995’s original Bad Boys—made for less than $20 million, pin money for Bay—The Rock had a $75 million price tag that expanded the director’s sandbox. His success in remaking the Fresh Prince as an action hero in Bad Boys made him an fit partner (even in the basest, most Mephistophelean terms) for Cage’s career change from rom-com mainstay and sometimes-serious actor into bankable Hollywood hunk. After all, if Bay could get Will Smith to pop his shirt off and wrangle his goofball comic energy into a believable turn as a movie star, then surely he could tame American cinema’s unhinged and (then, at least) critically revered kabuki wildman.

And so Cage was cast as the film’s star: FBI chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed, dispatched to Alcatraz to disarm all of those lethal rockets. Along for the ride was costar (and producer) Sean Connery, playing a wrongfully imprisoned escapee of America’s most legendarily inescapable prison. The result is ground zero for the commodification of Cage’s essential qualities—when his believable, electric vitality as a performer began to seem mawkish and even self-parodying.

Before The Rock, Cage seemed sincere. Even in sillier roles (like the Pokey-voiced Charlie in Peggy Sue Got Married), or ones where he goes way off the rails (see: Deadfall…or don’t), his performances were marked by a certain frankness. Even without necessarily believing that the acting was great in any conventional sense, it’s possible to believe that Cage believes it is great. When he was crazy, he was believably crazy. When he was weird, he was just as believably weird. Watching Bay try to be sincere is like watching one of those YouTube videos where a prototype anthropomorphic robot falls off a stage and ends up stranded on its back. It’s as embarrassing as it is unnerving; ludicrous without ever really being funny.

People talk about the uncanny valley as it pertains to humanoid CGI constructions on film, like Jar-Jar Binks or the dancing baby .gif. But Bay’s films are dyed and cast in a flesh-and-blood uncanny valley, one that seems somehow more ersatz and phoney-baloney than the glassy-eyed, computer-generated humanoids of something like that Final Fantasy movie. Bay takes the real—real people with hands and feet and hearts and minds—and makes them seem entirely artificial. He plays with them like action figures. This impulse is occasionally efficient, when his car chases and  rock ‘em-sock ‘em robot punch-ups achieve a rare coherence. But when people enter the equation, the image of Bay as the grinning kid who puts his G.I. Joe figures in the microwave reveals itself. (The Rock contains perhaps the definitive Bay image: a man at a computer console, the green strings of data on its screen reflected back onto his face like a dream of human beings reduced to programmable strings of code.)

Cage can’t escape this. His Goodspeed is a broad sketch of a person. Bay stacks up character tics like they’re superpowers or something, with no concern for cohesiveness or credibility, as if the action figure were reverse-engineered into a person. When we first meet Cage’s “chemical superfreak,” he’s sunk back in his chair at his FBI office, setting off a Rube Goldberg machine with a kids’ dart gun. Then he gets a $1,600 Meet The Beatles record in the mail, because he is a Beatlemaniac, which is a thing, and so also a character trait. Then, after narrowly diffusing a terrorist plot, he takes the day off to sit around in his apartment shirtless playing a big ol’ guitar. He also makes a point of never swearing. (Cage’s idea, apparently.) He says stuff like, “How in the name of Zeus’ BUTTHOLE ... ,” which is the kind of thing you’d never hear people say unless they were quoting The Rock, for some reason. He also eats pressure for breakfast, apparently.

Any one of these things wouldn’t nag. But, added together to make Cage’s characterization as a nerdy-cool Boy Scout, they go beyond seeming tokenistic. He’s a grab bag of peculiarities.

The Rock is not totally charmless, though. There’s a felt sense of torch-passing between its two leads. For as much as Connery has greyed into what we might consider a respectable actor, his own career trajectory was similar to Cage’s. He too ping-ponged between “serious” dramatic work (like Marnie, Hitchcock’s weirdest film) and the bubblegum-fun Bond movies. Also, Highlander. The Rock, ever elevating, persistently tries to class up Connery. Every time he shares a personal moment (there’s some stuff with his estranged daughter that just adds to the film’s already remarkable bloat), the soundtrack swells with Scottish flutes, as if to say, “This actor is Scottish.” In one of its many cake-and-eat-it-too moves, The Rock wants to have viewers believe Connery is some kind of upmarket actor, while also having him run around in a wet suit shooting two guns at once, or—in the film’s ugliest scene—intimidating a lampoonish caricature of a gay man on the balcony of a penthouse hotel suite.

The scenes between Cage and Connery seem to exist outside of the film, as if all the hullabaloo and shots from the perspective of a flying knife grind to a brief, blissful halt to let the two play off of each other. In one such pause, they stew in separate jail cells. Cage works though repetitions on the phrase, “I’ll take pleasure in gutting you, boy,” as Connery mutely hatches an escape. In this scene, Cage identifies The Rock’s guiding attitude. It’s not really one of elevated thinking, but rather of “pubescent volatility.” The Rock wants to have it both ways. It wants to be a grown-up movie about a Marine general at odds with his own sense of patriotic duty, and also a piece of whizz-bang action cinema paced for a 9-year-old. It’s like that Rush song: “Old enough to know what’s right, but young enough not to choose it.”

There are fleeting moments where Cage seems to perfectly apprehend this sense of adolescent joyriding. By the film’s end, his character transforms from an oddball chemical weapons nerd to full-blown, gun-toting action star, as if he’s been converted by all that pubescent volatility swirling around him. And—apart from those transient, amicable, too few and too far between scenes shared by Cage and Connery—it’s here that The Rock seems passably compelling.

As he did with Smith in Bad Boys, Bay engineers Cage’s conversion to full-blown stardom before our very eyes, as if we are buckled up and bearing witness to something seminal. After all, nothing certifies your status as a bankable Hollywood action hero like top billing in a Bay blockbuster. (See: Ben Affleck, Shia LaBeouf, Scarlett Johansson, etc.) To watch The Rock is to see Cage reborn. For better or worse.

The Rock screens Saturday, Feb. 4 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.