Nicolas Cage’s latest Shaman-like acting feat, this one is called “Renfield,” has a just-released trailer. It hints at another bonkers performance from the actor. In it, Cage plays a supporting role as Dracula. Sold.
It’s Cage’s 40th movie in the last 10 years. Is that a record? Maybe only Bruce Willis has made more in that time span. Regardless, this is a good opportunity to show appreciation for the legend.
Cage has no doubt had a rather strange acting career, especially the last decade or so where his film choices have gotten weirder and weirder. It's come to the point, sadly, where many movie fans just don't take him all that seriously anymore. Which is a shame, because this is the same Oscar-winning actor that, at some point in the late 80s to early 00s, gave us brave and exciting performances in films as diverse as "Adaptation", "Leaving Las Vegas", "Raising Arizona," "Wild At Heart" and "Red Rock West," just to name a few.
Yes, the 55-year-old actor sometimes does go back to his indie roots and makes, say, a potent indie like "Joe," or the batshit crazy "Mandy," ( I really don’t think Cage was acting in the latter. I believe they just put him in a cage, fed him cocaine and let him loose on set), but, through and through, Cage’s methodical approach to B-movie acting, which has, unfairly, done a great disservice to his actual talents as an actor, and even made him a YouTube sensation, is actually quite revolutionary.
Ethan Hawke has stated that Cage is “the only actor since Marlon Brando that's actually done anything new with the art of acting; he's successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism into a kind of presentation style of acting that I imagine was popular with the old troubadours."
There is a reason why Cage’s B-movies are better than, say, the straight-to-VOD fare John Travolta and Bruce Willis have given us recently. It's because you can tell Cage is jumping into the role, fully invested and giving it all he’s got. It doesn’t seem to just be about the paycheck for him. That helps bring out the entertainment value to the nth degree. Sometimes, one doesn’t need the best writing or the best story, to let ‘er rip, as they say.
Hawke is right, Cage’s gonzo-style acting, which he calls “Nouveau Shamanic,” is the kind of advancement of the acting art form that we haven’t really seen otherwise since probably Brando going method in the late ‘50s. Cage credits this style of performing as being inspired by the book The Way of the Actor from Brian Bates, which describes the parallel artistry between the ancient shamans and thespians. Cage has, more realistically, summoned up his acting style as a hybrid of German Expressionism and "Western kabuki".
If you watch Cage B-movie classics such as “Bad Lieutenant,” “Matchstick Men,” “Mom and Dad,” and, even, that silly “The Wicker Man” remake, you watch a style of acting incompatible with the realism invading most films these days; it’s entertaining, charismatic and, I’m being subtle here, wildly flamboyant. It’s almost like it comes straight from another dimension.
Many critics have accused Cage of overacting, but they seem to be missing the point. It’s a purposeful act in self-implosion, the notion that you can take a low-tier script, and fit a kind of stagey troubadour performing of the late 1800s into it, thus creating art out of pulp. David Lynch has described Cage as “the jazz musician of American acting”. I love that description, because, much like Jazz, there’s an impromptu improv-like nature to the delivery of his perfomances that feels incredibly unpredictable and damn-near revolutionary.