Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Wealthy as Croesus
Just got done watching The Family Man, a 2000 film from Nicholas Cage’s production company, Saturn Films. Cage is (for me, anyway) mesmerizing as usual, so an otherwise bland and predictable plot didn’t manage to drag down the movie. The Family Man is basically a latter day It’s A Wonderful Life, with Cage in the George Bailey role, Don Cheadle as the angel Clarence. Granted, it’s an inverse Wonderful Life, since Jack Campbell’s (the Cage character’s) real life is sucky, and the imaginary one is divine.
The movie is a paean to the simple pleasures. What good is wealth if you’re alone, and aren’t the joys of a loving wife and two great kids ample recompense for a top job on Wall Street, a hot car, and a high-rent Manhattan condo?
Is it possible to give spoilers on a ten-year-old movie? If so, you’ve been warned. Once Jack gets enough of a taste of life with Kate & the kids to know this life is superior to the real one, Don Cheadle (another actor with riveting stage presence, btw) reappears and Jack knows the jig is up, he’s been given his “glimpse” of an alternate life, and now it’s back to Wall Street for him. But the old life is empty and he wants Kate, who in this universe he left over a decade ago, dumped really, and she’s long since gotten over him and moved on. No husband or boyfriend conveniently enough, but she does have a box of old boyfriend Jack’s stuff which she wants to unload on him before moving to Paris.
He tries to make headway with her, but she is over him, I mean really OVER him, and all the soulful looks in the world won’t penetrate. Paraphrasing here, “Yeah, you broke my heart once, Jack, but that was a long time ago, and I’ve moved on.” He begs her not to get on the plane but she blows him off. It’s all very moving, and if she had gotten on the plane, and if perhaps we could then see Jack striking up a conversation with someone new, this would have been a great movie. Think about it: there’s the tragedy of what he has lost, but at least he’s learned enough that maybe there’s hope for him yet. Not a Happily Ever After, but honest, because in real life you can’t go home again, but you can make a new home elsewhere.
This movie? Nuh-uh, not honest. Kate’s in the boarding line and Jack starts yelling about how they have a house in Jersey, and two kids, and how they still love each other after all these years, and how she won’t even let him touch her unless he tells her he loves her, and how their daughter can’t play violin very well but is precocious nonetheless, yatta yatta yatta . . .
Bad turn by the screenwriter, because I don’t care past relationship together or no, this woman who hasn’t heard from this guy in what, 15 years, she’s gonna be thinking, Crazy. Stalkerish crazy. And she’s gonna be calling security if he takes one more step towards her. Instead, she has coffee with him. Role credits.
The irony here is that Nicholas Cage the real life dude makes Jack Campbell look like a burger-slinger. He owns his own production company, Saturn Films, which has been turning out some big movies since 2000, including National Treasure. Cage is on his third marriage, and at one point owned 15 homes (including an island near Nassau and a 24,000 square foot home in Rhode Island), a “flotilla of yachts . . . [and] a squadron of Rolls Royces,” as well as lots of odd purchases of jewelry, art, and a big fossilized dinosaur head, for which he overbid Leo DiCaprio.
No one can accuse Cage of making nothing but HEA movies (Bangkok Dangerous and Knowing, to name two, had downbeat endings), so perhaps he can be forgiven for making one film with a sentimental ending. But it seems to me that if anyone understood how The Family Man should have ended, it would have been Nicholas Cage.
D.
