Examining Nicolas Cage's career is like watching a guy ride a Segway: it works just fine, but damned if you can figure out how. The documentary Next puts Cage's career under the microscope, looking at how he alternates between mainstream action-adventure pics and offbeat emotional films, toggling between what CNN's Larry King calls “the crappy and the sappy.”
Director Lee Tamahori dialectical approach exposes the method to Cage's madness. The intimate, character-driven movies give Cage his gravitas. In an interview, casting agent Janet D'Amato points to Captain Corelli's Mandolin as an example. “In Hollywood it's understood,” she explains, “that only a serious actor would attach himself to a project that is from start to finish so godawful boring. The word 'Mandolin' alone makes people drowsy.”
Having established his acting cred, Cage returns to the big studios and churns out a “tentpole” movie, pocketing an eight-figure paycheck up front while getting more back-end action than Ned Beatty in Deliverance. Tamahori interviews Actors Studio host James Lipton, who describes Cage's acting technique in action films. “I'd call it wooden,” Lipton cracks, “but that would be unfair to wood. It's safe to say that he's phoned in more performances than the entire cast of Crank Yankers.
After each blockbuster, Cage returns to craft a small picture. Film critic Michael Wilmington weighs in on why Cage's offbeat movies may get better reviews than they deserve. “You can't pan what you don't see,” chirps Wilmington. “With The Weather Man, for example, somewhere between the opening credits and the thirty minute mark I was out like a light. Cage has a talent for creating the cinematic equivalent of a roofie. And that's a scary thought if you're locked in a dark screening room with Gene Shalit.”
Next is an ambitious documentary that uses the phenomenon of Nicolas Cage's career to bore into the psyche of the American consumer. It discovers a populace that craves familiarity over quality. The most prescient analogy the film draws is that of the Slim Jim. Given the choice between delicious, irregularly shaped beef jerky and a Slim Jim, more times than not Americans choose the Slim Jim even though it is nothing more than an omnibus of cow parts processed into a slimy tube of despair. Next anoints Nicolas Cage as the Slim Jim of movie stars - you know what you're getting, even if he doesn't do much for the human heart.
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