a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Directed by Ridley Scott; written by Nicholas Griffin and Ted Griffin, based on the book by Eric Garcia; director of photography, John Mathieson; edited by Dody Dorn; music by Hans Zimmer; production designer, Tom Foden; produced by Jack Rapke, Mr. Scott, Steve Starkey, Sean Bailey and Ted Griffin; released by Warner Brothers Pictures.
105 minutes. Rated PG-13.
STARRING: Nicolas Cage (Roy Waller), Sam Rockwell (Frankie), Alison Lohman (Angela), Bruce Altman (Dr. Klein) and Bruce McGill (Chuck Frechette).
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Matchstick Men is a movie about you and me. We’re all like the movie’s flawed hero. Let’s be honest. We’re all con-artists. With a straight face, we play life’s games, working to win what we want without really following the rules. We’ve all neglected responsibilities somewhere along the way and, whether we like to admit it or not, our foolishness has cost us something. The sins we try to conceal find their way into evidence… they crack our façade. They signal to others that something is not quite right inside.
Roy (Nicolas Cage), the central character of this modest comedy/crime-caper from Ridley Scott, is a quivering mass of distress signals. His body, his mind, his speech, and his daily routine are racked with obsessive-compulsive tics. His left eye winks fitfully when something is not right. He gets stuck moaning “uhhh… uhhh…” in mid-sentence as if he has suffered an internal error and lost connection with his server. He hates the outdoors. While he can’t tolerate a speck of dirt on his carpet, he’s polluting his lungs with cigarettes as fast as he can. And he goes bonkers if somebody leaves a door open.
Roy’s tics are all outward manifestations of inner turmoil, where something has indeed been left undone. He has led a life of crime. Somewhere along the way his pregnant wife left him. Now he suspects he might have a child out there, 14 years old, and he’s trying not to think about it.
As Roy and his protégé-partner Frank (Sam Rockwell, goofy as always) plan their next big con against a sitting-duck rich guy (Wings Hauser), the stress of it all is catching up to him. He can still pull off the phone-call cons, selling cheap water filters as expensive “water filtration systems.” He can convince people they have won prizes that they will never receive. But can he pull off the big scam?
When a crisis leads him to the couch of a psychoanalyst (Bruce Altman), Roy gets more than a renewal of his prescriptions. A few heavy questions later, he’s on his way back down memory lane to the scene of his marital collapse. And before he knows it, 14-year-old Angela (the extraordinary Alison Lohman) is knocking on his door, calling him “dad”, and cluttering his “perfect” apartment with empty pizza boxes and tubs of Ben and Jerry’s.
Of course, things get off to a rocky start between Angela and her flabbergasted father.
Of course, complications set in and the big grift goes awry.
Of course, the crook is caught in the undertow, reluctantly drawn toward repentance, reconciliation, and a life of responsibility.
And of course, Nicolas Cage revels in the chance to be explosive, zany, and manic … a welcome return to his strengths as an actor, something we haven’t seen him do since Red Rock West more than a decade ago. He has good chemistry with Sam Rockwell, even though Rockwell is making me suspect we’ve seen everything he has in his bag of comical tricks. But the scenes between Cage and the convincingly juvenile Lohman (who is actually 24 years old!) are wonderful; I hated to see them end.
Most surprising of all, even though the film is intimate and offbeat, Matchstick Men looks like a Ridley Scott film: It’s alive with vivid colorful light, cleverly arranged sets, and beautifully composed shots. Scott is one of the big screen’s best visual artists, but he often chooses scripts that are indulgent, misguided, or merely mediocre. His greatest works have been ambitious visionary sci-fi epics (Alien, Blade Runner), in which literary scripts have come to life through his impressive visual imagination. In the last decade, he’s squandered his talents on transparently political-or at least politically correct-parables (Thelma and Louise, G.I. Jane), a historical mess (1492: Conquest of Paradise), an indulgently violent and severely overrated epic (Gladiator), and a reckless and excessive horror film (Hannibal.) Here, he taps into something rich-a story in which the characters’ violent actions have consequences and they find fulfillment in truly meaningful things.
Despite its string of crime-caper clichés (the con man on the therapist’s couch, the scam that goes spectacularly wrong, the easily predictable “surprise-ending”), Scott’s focus on character and relationship helps the film transcend the typical mediocrity of its genre. The script by Nicolas and Ted Griffin (Oceans 11), from Eric Garcia’s novel, is funny and flighty enough to be consistently engaging. Several critics have complained about the tearjerking epilogue, but I found it to be far more delicate and satisfying than the usual sappy send-off. The sparks of energy, humor, anger, and warmth generated by Cage and Lohman give the film a healthy heart and a likeable nature that make its weaker points easily forgivable.
There is not much more to say about the film. It has a strong moral center: the con man is drawn to regret his life of crime. He pays for his sins. He gets caught in the gravitational pull of the family he abandoned. During his instinctive attempts to save his daughter from the temptations of a lawless lifestyle, he finds his own internal contradictions and begins to sort them out.
Cage makes Roy a sad, funny, and surprisingly likeable character. He may seem like a freak to moviegoers at first, but he’s not so different from us. We’re all conscientious criminals who find ourselves-flaws and all-mirrored in the misguided lives of others, in the world and in art. Stories like this are gentle, entertaining reminders of things we already know, but need to hear again and again. The more we give up control of our self-centered lives and make room in our hearts for the cares and concerns of others, the more we come to learn the rewards of the kind of life Christ modeled for us. Giving up the patterns and rituals that give him false security, Roy starts spending time with this impetuous, beautiful, needy little girl, and slowly discovers true healing. Those twitches in his eyes are slowly replaced by a heartening gleam.