When one first hears the logline for Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s debut as a feature director, they would be forgiven for making certain assumptions. The film is, technically speaking, about a loner played by Nicolas Cage in search of his prized truffle pig, which was kidnapped from his home in the woods by a couple of junkies. After that inciting incident, he will come out of self-imposed “retirement” and go on a quest that will take him into the very heart of his community’s dark underbelly.
On paper, it reads like a gonzo knockoff of Keanu Reeves’ John Wick movies in which a hitman also comes out of exile to avenge a murdered dog. This would likewise be in keeping with the current career trajectory which has taken Cage, an Oscar winning actor, into grindhouse detours like Mandy and Mom and Dad. However, the story that Sarnoski and his co-writer Vanessa Block wish to tell is something much more intimate, and ultimately affecting. Pig is not an action movie (although there is occasional violence) nor is it slop intended for the trough. Rather it is an earnest series of questions being raised about why someone—anyone, really—would retreat from society, and what would it mean for that person to re-engage with it. Over a beloved swine or otherwise.
Indeed, many queries popped into my head as the film begins with Rob, Cage’s deadened outcast, spending his days hunting for truffles in the woods with his pig, and then otherwise willing the days to end on a campsite he’s turned into an extremely utilitarian home. He is waiting for something, clearly, although for much of the film we do not know exactly what. Similarly, the nature of his relationship with Amir (Alex Wolff) is initially presented as an enigma. Appearing at first like a son, Amir is actually the middle man to whom Rob is selling the truffles. Yet there’s something more endearing, if strained, between the two men, which only comes to the surface well after their quest begins, taking them into the city’s unspoken of fight clubs and the tangle webs weaved by monopolistic food wholesalers.
It is actually Amir who provides the transportation and connections for Rob’s return to the world after the pig is stolen, bringing him to the town’s toniest restaurants, and the after hour criminal activity below. Like the shavings of onions in a gently layered dish, little by little we’re exposed to the details of both Rob and Amir’s past lives, and what a stolen truffle pig is really worth to a man who was once an internationally renowned chef before he vanished into the wilderness.
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