Nicolas Cage battles his own past and future in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

polygon.com:

The Polygon team is reporting in from the 2022 media expo SXSW, with a look at the next wave of upcoming independent releases in sci-fi, horror, and documentary film.

Nicolas Kim Coppola, better known as Nicolas Cage, would be a hard man to describe to anyone who was already unaware of his work. He’s a troubling and highly scrutinized public personality, an actor who’s both received great acclaim in serious dramas and made a name for himself in cheap DTV films of dubious quality. He’s prime meme material. He’s probably inspired more “Is he a great performer or an awful one?” debates than any actor in his generation. He’s a prolific actor who continues to both entertain the masses and elevate even the weirdest little indie he’s in by sheer energy and force of charisma.

The thing about Nicolas Cage is that he also completely understands what the public wants — he’s a reflexive, audience-aware performer who plays into and against expectations with every line, every expression. This is why the idea behindThe Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is such a slippery slope: It’sa movie where Nicolas Cage plays a fictional version of himself (named Nick Cage, with the K) in a movie all about the legend of Nic Cage. After Cage himself has spent the last decade, at least, playing right into the public’s idea of Nic Cage’s identity, is a meta-comedy about the man himself just redundant? The answer, like everything related to Nicolas Cage, is complicated. The film works like gangbusters, and it’s a terrific vehicle for Cage, but not for the reasons people might expect.

To the credit of director Tom Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’s scriptis as audience-aware as Cage’s acting. The moment