The Travolta/Cage Project #75 National Treasure (2004)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
When I was a film critic for The A.V Club many, many years ago I saw super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer as the enemy. To me, Bruckheimer was everything wrong with American movies.
The movies that Bruckheimer produced were the antithesis of the edgy American 1970s cinema that I grew up worshipping. Bruckheimer’s movies were loud and vulgar, invariably pitched to the lowest common denominator.
Bruckheimer didn’t make films or even movies so much as he churned out product designed to be mindlessly consumed and forgotten at the same time.
I feel differently now. I’ve gotten the fuck over myself enough to be able to appreciate Bruckheimer as an entertainer and professional vulgarian.
This column has been a huge help in that regard. I went into the project thinking that Bruckheimer had produced maybe two good movies in his entire career in Black Hawk Down and the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
I didn’t realize what an amazing team Nicolas Cage and Jerry Bruckheimer would prove to be or how Cage would bring out the best in the scourge of film critics everywhere.
In Con Air, The Rock, Gone in 60 Seconds and now National Treasure Cage plays overgrown Boy Scouts, All-American heroes who are invariably on the side of right even if they’re convicts, ex-convicts and career criminals.
The wildly entertaining blockbusters Bruckheimer produced for Cage make inspired use of the sweetness and innocence at the heart of the cult icon’s persona.
For all of his fabled eccentricity, there’s something ingratiatingly child-like about Cage, a guileless exuberance that makes it easy to buy him as a mensch who just wants to help people and make the world a better place.
In 2004’s National Treasure Cage plays Benjamin Franklin Gates, a professional treasure-hunter and the scion of a prominent family of kooks and weirdoes widely derided as kooky conspiracy theorists because they are convinced that the Founding Fathers and the Freemasons hid an almost inconceivably vast treasure from the British during the Revolutionary War.
In National Treasure’s genially unhinged world, Benjamin Franklin & Company laid out a series of clues to the treasure’s location, a trail of breadcrumbs, as it were, that if understood and followed would lead to its location.
Gates has spent his life looking for a vast fortune seemingly everyone outside of his family seem to agree is nothing more than a fairy tale.
Our intrepid hero knows better, however. Assisted by hoodie-wearing tech guy sidekick Riley Poole (Justin Bartha of Gigli and The Hangover fame), Gates discovers that the secret to the treasure’s location can be discerned partially from a map located on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
This of course means that our pure-hearted heroes must steal one of the most important documents in our nation’s history, but only so that they can keep it from being stolen by bad guys led by a lazily typecast Sean Bean.
That’s right: National Treasure is the movie where Nicolas Cage has to steal the Declaration of Independence for wholly honorable reasons.
With National Treasure, the filmmakers made two moves that ensured that the movie would be a delightful romp. First and foremost they cast Nicolas Cage in the lead. Secondly, they made the movie’s central MacGuffin the freaking DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
This means that for much of the film this literally priceless document is in danger of being dropped, run over by a car, crushed or otherwise destroyed or ruined. I wish they’d leaned into this just a little bit more and had scenes where our heroes accidentally gets gravy stains on the Declaration of Independence or lose it on a city bus.
Even though National Treasure is very famously the movie where Nicolas Cage steals the Declaration of Independence, this particular plot point never stops being hilarious. The first time it’s introduced it’s a goddamn hoot, a chuckle-worthy development in a movie that stops just short of making sweet love to the American flag. The thirtieth time someone mentions the necessity of stealing the Declaration of Independence it’s just as funny.
The theft of the Declaration of Independence is just one of a series of deftly realized set-pieces that find our heroes gallivanting about the country in search of the greatest treasure our nation has ever known, staying one step ahead of both the bad guys and Harvey Keitel’s Agent Peter Sadusky, who is leading the investigation of the theft of the Declaration of Independence.
National Treasure’s 131 minutes fly by at a shockingly brisk pace. It’s the perfect movie to put on in the background while folding laundry or paying bills because it requires next to nothing in the way of attention or concentration.
Turtletaub and his screenwriters find the perfect tone for the material, one that recognizes and understands the absurdity of the film’s premise without winking too hard in a way that would ruin the wholesome, lightweight fun.
There are moments throughout National Treasure when it comes more or less to a complete halt so that its heroes can take a step back and marvel at the enduring miracle that is American democracy.
In another context that might come across as pandering and nauseatingly sentimental, pure patriotism porn. But Cage’s guileless sweetness makes his character’s raging hard-on for our country, its values and its history irresistible instead of obnoxious.
Donald Trump’s presidency threatened to ruin conspiracy theories and patriotism permanently, if not the United States as a country, an idea and an ideal.
National Treasure made me proud to be an American for the first time in five very long years but it made me even prouder to be a Nicolas Cage fan. I’m not sure National Treasure would even make a list of my 40 favorite Cage movies but it’s nevertheless pure fun and a testament to the richness, depth and diversity of Cage’s extraordinary filmography.
Cage is the is the real National Treasure.
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