Pig

     Nicolas Cage and Alex Wolff in “Pig.” Neon image via IMDB

If you're a first time feature filmmaker, you've gotta be pretty sure of yourself to title your movie “Pig.”

Granted, pigs are no strangers to starring roles in movies. Who can forget Wilbur in “Charlotte's Web” – ? Or “Babe,” even though that particular porcine heartthrob had identity issues and thought he was a sheepdog.

But writer-director Michael Sarnoski went with the obvious, figuring “Pig” was a fine title for his tale of an off-the-grid hermit named Rob (Nicolas Cage) who has to revisit his very civilized former life in the city to search for his truffle-sniffing housemate after she's stolen from his cabin in the woods.

Sarnoski was just named best new filmmaker in the Hawaii Film Critics Society 2022 awards (http://hifilmcriticssociety.org), where his leading man Cage was named best actor. But it was an enthusiastic recommendation from my brother-in-law and his wife who had just seen “Pig” on Hulu that prompted me to move it up on my to-do list.

Cage, like Tom Hanks or Robert Redford, has reached the point in a been-there, done-that stellar film career where new challenges are the only thrill left. They have nothing to lose by co-starring with animals, sailboats or volleyballs in scripts where there's precious little dialogue to build a role on. Precious being the key word for Cage's performance, since when he does speak, he's usually sharing a pearl of wisdom.

Bearded and shaggy almost beyond recognition, his role owes a lot to the makeup department. Not only do we get the strong olfactory sensation – very difficult to accomplish on a movie screen – that he never bathes, but he spends a fair amount of the film getting beat up, and never bothers to wash the blood off, either.

Rob's search for the pig brings him back to Portland, Ore., reluctantly chauffeured by his materialistic young truffle buyer Amir (Alex Wolff). The search leads to the heart, and underbelly, of the city's fine dining scene where truffles are worth their weight in gold. Literally. As scuzzy as he may look now, Rob is no stranger to this world. A demigod – at least once upon a time – would be a more accurate description.

Not to give anything else away in the plot, elegantly crafted by Sarnoski and co-writer Vanessa Block, other than to observe the bond that begins developing between the enigmatic mountain man and his yuppie surrogate son. This stands in contrast to the young man's issues with his actual father (Adam Arkin), one of those powerful sophisticated thugs whose bad side you don't want to get on. He happens to be in the gourmet food business, too.

The Freudian father-son theme provides another archetype for Sarnoski to work with. He's the kind of filmmaker who paints with metaphors and mythic cinematic brushstrokes. Rob's sylvan cabin in the woods is as pure and perfect as the city, from its subbasements to its mansions, is decadent and doomed. 

While the quaint fable of a man searching for his pig may feel like a stretch these days, “Pig” proves to be engaging and entertaining, a fairy tale for our cynical times when happy endings are more modest, and a lot harder to come by than they used to be.