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Matchstick Men
***
Cinema
Review - October 7, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
116 minutes. Directed by Ridley Scott. Produced by Sean Bailey, Ted Griffin,
Jack Rapke, Ridley Scott, Steve Starkey. Written by Nicholas Griffin, Ted
Griffin; based on the book by Eric Garcia. Starring Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell,
Alison Lohman, Bruce Altman, Bruce McGill, Jenny O'Hara, Steve Eastin, Beth
Grant, Sheila Kelley.
"Matchstick Men" is a lot more engaging
than a circular argument, but it's about as frustrating. There are a lot
of things that got on my nerves in this movie, but more often than not they're
the same things that keep it engaging. Besides, they're necessary for the
movie to work on its own terms -- and I don't see a way to redefine those
terms. This paragraph is getting frustrating in itself, so let's put it this
way: You'll come out of the movie unsatisfied and maybe a little angry, but
you will have been involved and entertained.
Nicolas Cage stars, as a con man with so many
nervous ticks that he starts to twitch when sunlight hits his face and makes
a noise at every second word that comes somewhere between a grunt and a hiccup.
Sam Rockwell is his partner, a slick young cat entertained by pretty much
everything, who shouts encouragement to Cage and dives into every new job
with a yee-hah in his eyes.
As the movie opens, they're playing people for
suckers over the phone, selling $50 water filters for five times the tag
price. Then they go over to the customers' houses, tell them they're
investigators chasing phoney phone salesmen, and hit them up for serious
cash. Soon, a new score presents itself: There's a greedy businessman played
by Bruce McGill, who wants to make a profit by swapping large sums of American
money for the same number in English. Cage and Rockwell have told McGill
they work for the banking industry, and can't change a lot of currency without
being investigated -- he'd be helping them out as well as making a profit.
Their real plan, of course, is to pretend to make a switch while keeping
hold of everything.
The big plot complication comes in the form of
Alison Lohman, as a fourteen-year old girl called Angela. She comes into
Cage's life a decade and a half after he broke up with his wife -- the daughter
he never met, and wasn't totally sure had been born. On top of his own
obsessive-compulsive crap, like feeling the need to clean every speck of
his house in the middle of the afternoon or take pills to calm his weirdo
behaviour, he now has to deal with a girl in the middle of puberty, who demands
and shows off and eats nothing but junk food, and shows an unhealthy interest
in learning the con artist business.
"Matchstick Men" doesn't turn into a retread of
"Paper Moon", or spend the amount of time that David Mamet would on explaining
the ins and outs of con-jobs. It centres on Cage himself, and how every waking
moment is an absurdly suffocating battleground. There isn't a thing that
doesn't stress him out -- the doorbell rings, and his head swings round in
a fit of paranoia as he crouches on the breakfast bar and starts to
hyperventilate.
The movie is less a character study than a character
rollercoaster ride. As Cage goes gloriously over the top, as Lohman demands
on one side and Rockwell does his routine of prickish overconfidence on the
other, the shots are cut together at breakneck speed. It's a dizzying, hilarious
frenzy, matching the velocity of the Cage performance and drawing us into
his consciousness. The filmmaking overkill continues in the cinematography;
it's all piercing light, reflected off the edges of objects and faces, drawing
attention to itself.
Should I condemn the whomping visual technique,
or praise it? Both, I guess, because it gave me a headache and inspired me
to tut-tut at the lazy showiness of it all, but still ended up entertaining.
It's over-the-top, but it really does match the work of Cage, who performs
the same ticks in every scene but makes them fresh through context and subtle
changes of intensity. Staying close to Cage makes even more sense after the
twist of the final act, which also explains why the movie needed to juggle
so many threads while not going to deep on a single one.
Twists, bloody twists, they infuriate me every
time. And this is what I was getting at in the opener -- "Matchstick Men"
rubs in our faces how tight and clever it is, with a style that slaps us
in the face, but has its reasons, and a final revelation that makes the movie
a con, but therefore has poetic justice in relation to the story. The director
is Ridley Scott, whose last movie was "Black Hawk Down". That one was so
violent and rattling that I felt obliged to call it a good movie, but I didn't
exactly respect it and will probably never see it again. "Matchstick Men"
has a rhythm and conclusion that doesn't let us feel fulfilled, but keeps
us watching and rethinking in a way that you can't quite
dismiss.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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