Pig (2021)

directed by Michael Sarnoski

USA, UK

92 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Pig has been described as a deconstruction of the revenge genre that pokes holes in our expectations of it; kind of an anti-John Wick. But I struggle to really compare it to anything else, because my experience watching it and what it imparted on me was so singular that I can't think of many other movies that do the same or even similar things. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, something about this goes beyond film and beyond fiction and resonates very, very deeply with real life.

So the gist of it is that Nicolas Cage plays a truffle farmer whose beloved truffle pig is stolen one day, and the film follows his journey to the city (accompanied by his initially-a-scumbag truffle buyer) to find out who has the pig and get them to return it. But this does not play out in an action-packed sequence of events full of adept fights and pulse-pounding negotiations with a slew of clever bad guys. When Cage's character, Robin, first comes to his buyer with the news of the theft of his pig, he immediately knows the language he has to speak to this guy, who lives in an entirely different world from him. He goes right to the money to convince the buyer to help him, telling him "You want your supply, you help me find her." This one line is small, but in saying it, Robin has to debase his deeply personal and transactional relationship with the pig and re-craft it as something the buyer can understand. The pig must be commodified, her status as a living, feeling creature reduced to her ability to bring in cash. Under capitalism all relationships with creatures deemed "lesser" than humans must necessarily form without reciprocity: The pig works for us, brings us money; the pig gets nothing in return. This lack of respect for the most basic parts of the world in which we live is a central, recurring theme of Pig.

I think more than anything the heart of this movie is about the total senselessness and meaninglessness of life, and its impermanence. This does not have to be a bad thing, but we live in a world where people will do bad things because they either misunderstand that or don't realize it at all. Robin's entire philosophy seems to basically be that sooner or later everything is going to fall into the sea. He has that uniquely West Coast awareness that a natural disaster is one day going to come and wipe everything out, and none of us are really prepared for that, so we're all going to die. But in the meantime, there are a few things, just a few things, that each of us can find and hold onto- like a pig, like a favorite meal, like the relationship you wish you had with your father. And the fact that there is no ultimate goal in life other than to get yourself into a place where you're surrounded by the people and things you love, and to bring joy to other people as they try to do the same for themselves, is what makes it so deeply horrifying that, despite the limits of our time in this world, capitalism continues to persist. It is horrifying that in the face of our own impermanence, the most powerful among us still enshrine a system in which a select few control the vast majority of wealth, and instead of creating a better future, they keep up this everyone-for-themselves version of life in which your ability to work determines whether you live in relative peace or suffer and die hungry. Robin has to couch his desire to find his pig in the pig's ability to turn a profit because he knows that the people who abducted the pig won't understand his real feelings about her, subscribing as they do to the system of endless and increasing profit generation.

There is a scene where Robin visits his old house in the city, now much changed since his retreat to the woods. The back door is open and there's a very young boy sitting on the steps playing a handpan. They have a conversation, just a short one, but a meaningful one all the same. Our first reaction as viewers comes from instinct; of course we want to tell this boy not to talk to strangers. We react to how dangerous it is for a little boy to be calm and stay put while an adult stranger sits down next to him. But this is a story, a film that's deliberately trying to tell us something. It is not real life. And I think what it's trying to tell us is that it's important and beautiful that there exists a little boy this trusting, this innocent. And it's important and beautiful that there is an adult who will respect that trust as sacred and not break it.

I don't really know how to talk about this film. Part of me is uneasy with the artifice of it, with Cage as an extremely rich person putting on this disguise of a loner living out in the woods to whom finances are irrelevant. However, his character's material poverty is a choice, not a result of classism, so this portrayal doesn't feel like a Hillbilly Elegy-esque exploitation of the poor as some sideshow exhibit. There are flaws here, but I also can't pretend to demand that any creator with a message about compassion and peace divest themselves of their worldly wealth to deliver it. I would not believe any statement Jeff Bezos put out regarding loving one another, because he has the actual ability to lessen suffering greatly, and chooses to go to space and continue stockpiling mind-boggling wealth instead. But on the level of this film, on the level of the people who made it, I don't think that contributes enormously to the overall suffering of the world, and, if even one person can watch this and realize that there's no reason to struggle, because everything is futile and we don't get, as Robin says, a lot of things to really care about, then that's worthwhile. I feel like this movie aged me ten years.