Pig
R, 92 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema
Sometimes the beauty of a film lies in its simplicity. When character development and atmosphere are allowed to be front and center, the strength of cinema as an art comes into focus. With a few missteps, Pig is a beautiful example of earnest filmmaking.
In short, the film, written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, is about a man looking for his pig. But it’s no ordinary pig that Rob (Nicolas Cage) is searching for. This is a truffle-hunting pig named Apple, who earns Rob his income and sustains him as a gruff loner in the wilderness outside Portland, Oregon.
Rob has occasional visits from truffle buyer and bourgeois annoyance Amir (Alex Wolff), and their relationship is symbiotic but tense. And when a pair of meth addicts steal Apple during a violent late-night ambush, Rob turns to Amir for both a ride to the city, which Rob left 15 years ago, and help finding his beloved pig.
As the film follows Rob and Amir on their amateur sleuthing expedition, a depth and tenderness develops between the pair. Amir’s grating exterior begins to crumble, and while he never entirely pours his soul out to the bearded forager, he becomes more honest with himself.
Rob, on the other hand, does not change. He doesn’t need to. This is not a story about Rob discovering himself, like it is for Amir. We learn how Rob, once a legendary chef, became a mushroom-hunting hermit, and what he left behind, but Pig goes off track when we see Rob doing things that do not fall in line with his character or with the world he currently lives in. In one scene, the movie dips into a hyper-violent urban underbelly that feels dishonest for the characters, and it’s hard to swallow.
Pig also has an uneven assessment of fine-dining and chefs’ egos. The culinary focus is no surprise, given that a truffle pig and the truffle trade are at the core of the story, but it does seem to be of two minds when it comes to the state of the celebrity chef.
In one scene, Rob literally sticks his thumb into an over-the-top fancy meal and takes the chef to task for being full of himself. Not much later, the camera lingers over every drip of sauce and potato slice of a meal prepared with a similar degree of pretension. The setting has changed and the circumstances are different, but one meal is offensive and the other delectable—and we are never told the difference.
Cage deserves praise for his understated performance, but Wolff is the one who does the emotional heavy lifting. While the plot is focused on Rob’s mission to find his pig, every moving shift lies with Amir, who goes from sleazy to sympathetic. All in all, Pig is a strange, heartbreaking, sometimes funny art-house winner that moves us with its message of love and loss.