For a brief stretch there in the late ’90s, Nicolas Cage was practically the living embodiment of wasted talent, his remarkable range and versatility having been squandered in the service of a multitude of abominable movies (City of Angels, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin). Every once in a while, though, he summons a knockout performance to reaffirm his undoubted status as one of the best five or six actors in the Hollywood firmament.
Adaptation and Bringing Out the Dead provide cast-iron proof of Cage’s capability, and Matchstick Men (Ridley Scott’s first watchable work in aeons after trotting out White Squall, GI Jane, Gladiator, Hannibal AND Black Hawk Down in succession) continues the trend. Cage and Sam Rockwell team up as a pair of smalltime con-men. Cage’s character is a disintegrating obsessive-compulsive nervous wreck whose sanity is stretched even further by an unexpected meeting with a 14-year-old daughter of whose existence he had previously b een unaware.
The girl (Alison Lohman), a spirited tomboy type, ends up aiding daddy’s scams, while his agoraphobia, hygiene mania and general mental instability recedes for a while. What unfolds is a largely typical – though resolutely unsentimental – tale of father-daughter bonding, played out
against a gently comic backdrop of elaborate
but smalltime scams, Cage’s nervous tics and stutters, Rockwell’s atypically slick con-artistry and the teenage daughter’s appropriate lack of discretion.
Bruce Altman chips in a lively turn as Cage’s shrink, while Cage and Rockwell spar energetically throughout. Most mercifully of all, Scott entirely shies away from his trademark pyrotechnics. Subtle and quietly uplifting, Matchstick Men never threatens to materialise into a classic, but easily knocks the crap out of like-minded recent efforts like Confidence. Cautiously recommended.