Pig is a weird movie. Look, there will be people out there who say, “Yeah, sure, it’s Nic Cage, of course it’s weird.” But when they say that, they’re imagining a very specific kind of weird. They’re imagining an epic freakout, the kind of thing that might make a good supercut and a terrible film.
That’s not the kind of weird that Pig is.
Pig is a sweet, sensitive, unexpected kind of weird. It’s strangely earnest for a film that features an underground restaurant worker fight club. And it might be the best performance Nic Cage has ever given.
“They’re not real. You get that, right?”
Rob (Nicolas Cage) lives in the woods. His only companion is a truffle pig. Together, the two of them scrape by finding truffles in the forest and selling them to Amir (Alex Wolff), a city-dwelling kid who sources quality ingredients to high-end Portland restaurants.
One night, a couple local junkies steal Rob’s pig. Rob enlists Amir to take him to track down the couple that stole his pig, a quest that will take the two of them into the city. There, Rob must confront the wreckage of his past as he seeks to find his only companion.
“None of it is real.”
On its surface, Pig has a weird premise: What if John Wick was about a chef rather than a hitman? The hook is the same: An aging, retired legend is forced back into a world he left behind after a home invasion robs him of a beloved pet that doubles as a stand-in for a long-lost spouse. It’s a really specific story, so specific it’s impossible to ignore. And yet, debut writer/director Michael Sarnoski has made a movie that is profoundly, distinctively his own. Nobody tried to distinguish itself by focusing heavily on frustrated masculinity. Gunpowder Milkshake tried to distinguish itself by leaning into comedy. Polar tried to distinguish itself by being awful.
Pig distinguishes itself by refusing to give you what you want.
For instance, take the film’s weirdest scene. There’s a sequence pretty early on, when Rob returns to Portland and seeks out a man named Edgar for information about his pig. Edgar, it turns out, runs an… underground restaurant worker-themed fight club? There, he lets someone beat him up for sixty straight seconds, hands behind his back. He refuses to fight.
What the fuck? It’s easy to dismiss the scene. It’s a small one. But it sticks out like a sore thumb. In a film that is so relentlessly anti-violent, so thoroughly about the shared emotional experience brought on by art, where is this coming from?
I suspect part of it involves Sarnoski’s desire to set up that anti-violence. Look at the John Wick comparison, after all. “Aging actor hunting down the people who stole from him” is a well-established genre at this point, and with genre comes expectation. By putting Rob into a situation where he must aggressively choose not to fight, must let himself get beat up, the movie signals two things: There must be another way to resolve conflict — and we should expect our desire for visceral, reactionary vengeance to be meted out to be unsatisfied.
How well this bait-and-switch works will differ wildly depending on the person. Even within the film, I think there’s a difficulty in matching the artistic and humanistic elements with the fact that, say, the most important women in the story are dead or comatose. But I still found value in Pig‘s forceful refutation of the lust for righteous violence. I found it moving.
“The critics aren’t real. The customers aren’t real.”
One of the most emotional scenes, for me, in Pixar history comes at the end of Ratatouille. In it, malevolent restaurant critic Anton Ego eats Remy’s ratatouille. It transports him instantly to another time and place. The food, it turns out, has a deep emotional resonance with Ego. His mother cooked it for him as a child. Remembering happier times, Ego is confronted with the life he has built for himself.
There are certain experiences that touch our humanity. Art is one. Food is another. Roger Ebert once called films “machines that generate empathy.” These experiences can help build bonds between people across a gulf of misunderstandings and frustrations. This is why so many cultures hold hosting, sharing food, as a vital responsibility.
Pig taps into the bonds that food builds the same way Ratatouille did, but in a more complicated way. In doing so, Pig asks its viewers to reject the easy, immediately satisfying urges, to favor a more complicated palette. A lesser movie may have had a hard time selling this idea. But Pig is grounded by Nic Cage’s wounded humanity and Alex Wolff’s desperate desire for approval, a pair of simple but indelible performances that keep the film alive. Together, they turn what could have been a boilerplate thriller into something stranger and more meaningful.
“Because this isn’t real. You aren’t real.”
Pig is streaming now on Hulu. It was written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, and stars Nicolas Cage and Alex Wolff.