Pig, And Understanding What Matters
“We Don’t Get A Lot Of Things To Really Care About”
Tristan Young @talltristan
I recently shared an abridged version of this essay in Midrange Weekly, however I had more to say about the film and wanted to expand upon my thoughts, hence we are posting this in our film section
I really have no business writing about this movie, one that is so interested in food. Unless that’s the point of Pig, to interrogate not so much the utility and efficacy of our colloquial foodie culture, but to examine its meaning. More urgently, to dismantle that meaning and search for a deeper understanding of what food can represent for us beyond sustenance and beyond the hierarchal frivolity of the cultural elitism that comes from the greater gestalt of the restaurant industry. It endeavours, with a near infiltrating air of grace and subtlety, to offer instead the ways in which memory, community, empathy, and fragility are inexorably entwined within the simple act of having a meal. These confluences are messy, draining, cathartic, and unruly; the kind of thing that- to bluntly borrow from the lexicon of the very industry being skewered- cannot be neatly plated. Therefore the perverse industrial complex of the perennial high-end restaurant is thusly uniquely ill equipped to communicate what food means to us. With this conceit in mind, beyond a genuinely emotional journey, Pig justifies its existence and thesis to a marvellously acute degree. Yes this is the movie with Nicholas Cage and his pig.
You read any brief description, review, whatever, about Pig, directed by Michael Sarnoski, and they all include some variant of the line, “not just John Wick but with a pig”. Such a qualification has a pretty reductive sentiment behind it (not that the John Wick movies aren’t fucking awesome), as the trailers don’t really imply such a violent journey. That being said, the aesthetic of a bloody and bruised Nicholas Cage looking like he got mauled by a bear and is just as angry as you’d expect about it certainly implies the mood of a deranged man on the edge and ready to snap at any time. This tension is embedded into many of Pig’s scenes and serves as an effective bit of visual misdirection. This film is at times violent but rarely in the ways you’d expect.
What Pig is about is a man and his pig… right. Nicholas Cage plays Robin Feld, a retired chef of somewhat legendary, indeed near mythic, status in the bleeding edge Portland food scene. Long since abandoning his restaurant empire after the death of his wife (ok fine it has some John Wick similarities so sue me), Feld has retreated into the rural Oregon outskirts to lead a seemingly libertarian life off the grid with no company other than his admittedly very cute pig. The pig helps him hunt for truffles in the picturesque hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest, which he then sells to restaurant suppliers. His principal buyer is an up and coming purveyor of gourmet ingredients in the Portland food scene, the ambitious if conceited Amir, played by Alex Wolff, who at least isn’t as having as bad a time here as he did in Hereditary. Feld’s relationship with Amir is defined by no questions asked vagaries as much as business like reciprocity. They aren’t friends, and Amir doesn’t truly know who Feld is. But Feld doesn’t really have any friends. When he is violently attacked and his pig is brutally stolen from him by mysterious assailants, Amir is really the only person Feld can go to for help; the only person he knows at all.
In his role Cage fulfills the dichotomous potential that is and has always been Nicholas Cage. Let him do his thing but for the love of god give him the right context to do it in. With one of the most discordant and down right strange carers in modern cinema, Cage is at once a truly dignified thespian but also the guy who wanted to do Superman but with his Con Air mullet. In Pig, he is wonderfully subdued, but only to a point. Whereas the battered and ossified exterior- dust ejects his from his skull upon being punched- implies a core of pent up and calamitous violence, it is instead an earnestly tender and caring man hidden behind all that dirt and grime. Cage is not self-satisfied as these revelations come to the forefront, instead revealing his inner pathos along alternating vectors of anguish and confidence. Sometimes both at the same time. He cannot shake some of his fundamental Cage-isms at times; He still has that way of observing his surroundings from top to bottom with a mixture of bemusement and incredulity that recalls the slight silliness of his 90s zenith.
Just a hint of that ludicrousness seeps into dialogue in ways that I can’t help but feel is a bit of a wink on Cage and Sarnoski’s part. One particular exchange elicits a touch of cringy amusement when he says, “they took my pig”, with more than a hint of southern drawl that comes out of nowhere. That exchange takes several more steps into conversational hijinks when the other character in the scene abruptly screams, “mother fucker!” at the reveal that it was a truffle hunting pig. Sarnoski understands that the film’s plot is at least a little ridiculous, nominally speaking, and doesn’t mind leaning into it touch. I’m pretty sure another scene later in the film when a character admits he underestimated Cage and now has egg on his face was a deliberate pun. At least I hope it was.
Such moments of levity are of course sporadic at best within the film’s deeply serious tone. Across Pig’s three acts Feld and Amir, who is at first reluctantly along for the ride, dig deeper and deeper into the seedy and morally onerous underworld of Portland’s food scene. The clarity of Portland’s urban beauty, a mixture of ruggedly authenticity and architectural precision as symbolized by its many bridges, slowly diffuses into a claustrophobic array of labyrinthine visual obfuscation. The film in this regard does an excellent job of priming you for a decent into the unknown. Indeed the developing intrigue of what goes on behind the scenes is rather captivating, shedding a light on the literal underground of Portland’s secret past through the lens of the underbelly of its legacy and trendy restaurants. Sadomasochistic fight clubs, hired goons, facsimiles of mafia dons, and more malignant forms of subtle control all make up the burrowing tendrils and firmaments that prop up the glamour of food culture. This is obviously a fiction, but for those of us that have worked in the industry, it plays into sentiments and cynical ponderances that we have all had about what goes on at the top and where the top meets the bottom. At the very least it justifies the occasional hatred we have against some of our suppliers.
While the hypotheticals of a salacious restaurant underworld as rendered through the lens of someone like Fincher certainly makes for engaging moments- the manner in which Cage has to earn information about the whereabouts of his pig is particularly rough- it’s the pearlescent surface that is shown to the rest of the world that takes the brunt of Pig’s invective; rightly so. In a slyly sub textual aside to the unrelenting restaurant obsession with deconstructing ingredients and palates, so to does the narrative dismantle the artifice behind all of it. This is an industry whose malevolent but ostensible true colours are personified by an odious middle venue operator, well aware of Feld’s storied history, that says to him, “You don’t have any value, you don’t exist any more”. A person’s worth in this industry is affixed only to the trends they can claim adjacency to; the positive reviews or word of mouth they can garner. Without those things, they are nothing; this is the culture. Elsewhere in the film when Feld and Amir are covertly on a mission to uncover more pig related clues they dine at one of the currently trendy lunch spots in Portland. While Feld remains stoic and taciturn, one can’t help but sense the eye roll he is keeping at bay as the server gives them an almost aggressively pretentious spiel as to the integrity of not just the ingredients or the method, but the atmosphere of the meal they are going to have. Feld wants not of it, literally sticking his thumb in the food in a wonderfully blunt metaphor. The film ably and eloquently uses Feld’s jaded and weathered persona as explicit contrast to the pristine and nearly hedonistic privilege behind foodie elitism. Cage’s bloodied and fed up façade juxtaposed by act titles that you’d see on a Hawksworth menu encapsulates the dichotomy perfectly. One wonders what is going on his head at the time.
Pig does not give many windows into Cage’s id beyond the occasional moment of revealing conversation. Swapping between the alienating forest Cage dwells in, felonious behind the house scenes and a whole lot of other discordant sets, one can’t infer a lot of interpretation from Pig’s mercurial style. Listening to the score implies that this may be intentional. Between shuffling and manic string sections, labours classical movements, and wryly restrained bouts of sonic foreboding in the vein of Trent Reznor, the score is all over the place. It doesn’t exactly seem congruous with the shifting settings, which one could infer as a means to convey that Cage’s character was never meant for either of the worlds he occupied, which is just existentially nerve wracking enough to not consider it too much. There are other themes to dissect after all.
The film does not mince ideas about the moral vacuum such cultural elitism takes place in, and how it coalesces into straight up evil without much of a narrative or, crucially, rhetorical leap. As we dive deeper into the film and the architect of Feld’s misery is revealed, we see the logical end point of such elitism. The vernacular behind trendy restaurant culture transforms so easily into casual villainy as if to confirm the ethical depravity behind such finessed consumerism. At the end of a trail of comprised bussers, cooks, chefs, and influencers is a person who sees this as nothing more than commerce. Those at the top proudly display not just their cultural aristocracy, but also their avarice- how they have weaponized and manipulated the passions and dreams of some into nothing beyond raw transactional calculations.
This of course is true for any industry where art- and food is art- is involved. But having spent all of my adult life in this industry, acutely aware of the razor thin profit margins, the devastation to mental health that so many in the field have been afflicted with, and the funnelling of money away from those that care the most, I find this film intensely satisfying in how it not only understands my sentiments but allows them to metastasize into sincere and compelling story. I don’t mind saying that I grew pretty disillusioned by the pretension that permeates the restaurant industry, to the point where I wonder if I want to ever go back. I also recognize that I simply may not just have the appetite for it in the way that a lot of other people I worked with- many of whom are amazing and deserve all the success they have worked for- do. I’m glad Pig takes the time to see it from this perspective.
If that’s as far as Pig took it- as far as my own internalized opprobrium- that would be fine I suppose. But the film takes things several steps further than I was ever willing to do. Pig does appreciate food- absolutely it does. Rather than simply lambasting the culture of food, it looks for the merit more deeply and intrinsically at its core. It saves this sentiment for later on though, actively trying to dissociate from that pretention and instead connect it with ideas of community and healing. Going back to that act two restaurant scene, Cage’s tone switches from derisive apathy as the Chef, a former prep cook of his, drones on and on about his restaurant concept, to actually searching for a way to connect with him. Feld recalls how the once incompetent cook- now a prestigious chef- formerly wanted to open a simple pub. As the conversation segues from discomforting to oddly cathartic you see how much Feld remembered about him, how much he valued his old employee’s dreams, earnestly urging him to reconnect with those dreams and not be beholden to critics and the modern intelligentsia that eats his food. “You live your life for them, and they don’t even see you”, he pleads as both of them breathe heavier, reconnecting with memories that they both would rather have expunged. He concludes, “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about”- that’s honestly one of the best delivered lines I’ve seen in a movie in a long time.
Later on in the film Feld has another discussion about food with a baker. All of the glamorous trappings of a high end restaurant are supplanted for a humble café. The lyrical gymnastics that go into describing a dish are discarded for genuine admiration behind the skill of it. Here Feld is engaged. When offered a parting gift in the form of a baked good he humbly asks for a second. Not because they look that good (the look pretty good though!), but because he wants to get one for Amir, who Feld is starting to consider might actually be his friend. After all, they’ve shared several meals together at this point.
That sense of disarming empathy culminates in the film’s climax. As tensions rise and desperation sets in one can be forgiven that Feld truly will snap, especially with the film’s antagonist glibly revelling in his own malice and assured immunization from consequences. Instead the film brilliantly weaves the tangential back story of Amir’s family with the idea of how sensations like taste and smell can elicit, but also define, emotions and memory. To say a bonding experience happens is not exactly accurate; indeed things get quite traumatic in the end. But when Feld says he remembers every meal he’s ever cooked, every guest he’s ever talked to, you know he’s telling the truth. That the particular memories being evoked through Feld’s cooking in the end clarify for the characters on screen at the exact same time as the viewer- in other words, when you figure out what his seemingly esoteric plan was- is a remarkable achievement in minimalist story telling. No one in the room is immune to the ramifications and impact of one specific dish, made with one specific intent. It’s at this moment that you’ll look back on how wild it ever was to suggest this film was a John Wick clone.
In the second act of the film one of the characters intones, “There’s really nothing here for most of us”. That’s a sentiment that so many of us in the restaurant industry have likely had as the pandemic chewed a lot of us up and spit us out. But by the end of Pig, the film invites you not so much to reconsider that sentiment but to consider the different ways food can mean things to other people, not to ourselves. Even if it doesn’t mean much to you personally (it really doesn’t to me but here I am writing about it), it earnestly and profoundly asks us to understand why it might to other people. All of the characters get there in their own way by the film’s end, and yet all end up in different points along the spectrum of personal growth. It’s messy, in other words. And it’s draining, debilitating even. But I’d wager so are some of the best meals any of us have ever had. You can probably remember some of them.