The Great Movies III

And Cage. There are often lists of the great living male movie stars: De Niro, Nicholson, and Pacino, usually. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He's daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off, and remain suspended in air. No one else can project inner trembling so effectively. Recall the opening scenes in Leaving Las Vegas. See him in Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead. Think of the title character in The Weather Man. Watch him melting down in Adaptation. And then remember that he can also do a parachuting Elvis impersonator (Honeymoon in Vegas), a wild rock 'n' roller (Wild at Heart), a lovesick one-handed baker (Moonstruck), a straight-arrow Secret Service agent (Guarding Tess), and on and on.

He always seems so earnest. However improbable his character, he never winks at the audience. He is committed to the character with every atom and plays him as if he were him. His success in making Charlie Kaufman a neurotic mess and Donald Kaufman a carefree success story, in the same movie, comes largely from this gift. There are slight cosmetic differences between the two: Charlie usually needs a shave, Donald has a little more hair. But the real reason we can tell the twins apart, even when they're in the same trick shot, comes from within: Cage can tell them apart. He is always Charlie when he plays Charlie, always Donald when he plays Donald. Look and see.

here is something wrong with Collie, but it's hard to put your finger on it. He tells the bartender he pours a good glass of beer, and the bartender feels like throwing him out of the bar. He looks like a bum, clutching that parcel wrapped in brown paper, but he's young and handsome and will tell you that he's an ex-serviceman with a year and a half of community college. He walks unsteadily out of the blinding sunlight of the desert and into a run-down suburb of Palm Springs, where his destiny is sitting in the same bar, smoking a cigarette.

Her name is Mrs. Fay Anderson. She is pretty clearly an alcoholic. Why else, after Collie beats the bartender senseless, would she follow him down the street in her car and offer him a ride? She does this not because she is drunk, but because widowhood and drinking have put her into the orbit of Uncle Bud, a man whose moneymaking plans require someone like Collie: needy, vulnerable, presentable, persuadable. Individually, these three people are hopeless loners. Together, they are a danger, because they are just smart enough to think up plans they're stupid enough to try.

After Dark, My Sweet (1990) tells their story as an inevitable progress toward failure and doom. What makes the story fascinating is the subterranean way Collie understands everything that is going wrong, understands Mrs. Fay Anderson is a good person and needs to be protected, and protects her in a way so subtle she may still be wondering if he did what she thinks he did.

The movie, based on a novel by Jim Thompson, the poet of circa-i95o pulp noir, has a stubborn, sullen truth to it, focusing on its handful of characters during the course of a particularly incompetent kidnapping. The story is so intimate that everything depends on the performances, and Jason Patric, Rachel Ward, and Bruce Dern, and a character actor named George Dickerson, bring a grim, poetic sadness to the story. Film noir, we are reminded, is not about action and victory, but about incompetence and defeat. If it has a happy ending, something went wrong.

After Fay (Ward) picks up Collie (Patric), she offers him the use of a house trailer at the far end of her dying palm plantation, a kiss on the doorstep, and a lot of drinking companionship. Through her he meets Uncle Bud (Dern), who says he is a former police detective with "connections on the force," and who seems to have no life at all apart from sitting in Fay's living room enlisting them in his scheme to kidnap the son of a rich local man. Fay tells Collie to get away, get out of town: "His scheme's been cooking for months, and if you go away, it will keep right on boiling until it boils away."

Flashbacks inform us that Collie is a former boxer who was in one fight too many-both for his own mental acuity and for the life of the fighter he beat to death. In an all-night diner, he stumbles into Doc Goldman (Dickerson), who takes one look at him and guesses, correctly, he is AWOL from a mental institution. The Doc has a concerned and kindly manner, which masks sexual desire; he invites Collie into his home, offers to let him stay, gives him employment. But Collie cannot take that form of captivity, and returns one morning to Fay's door.