The Sonny Boy Ain't Right! My World of Flops # 187/The Travolta/Cage Project # 69 Sonny (2002)
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
One of the many things I absolutely adored about Zola, a movie I love, is that it’s not like all the other movies about prostitution. By “all the other movies about prostitution” I am specifically referring to movies like Nicolas Cage’s poorly received 2002 directorial debut Sonny, a period drama set in 1981 that casts James Franco as a handsome young stud who has been selling himself sexually since he was a child for the benefit of his monstrous mother/madam. Zola gingerly sidesteps all of the land mines, cultural, creative and otherwise, that Sonny foolishly decides to leap onto.
Zola was at one point supposed to be directed by Sonny star James Franco. Then the #MeToo movement happened and people wisely realized that allowing a man with multiple accusations of sexual improprieties, like Franco, some involving misconduct on film sets, to direct a movie about the real-life experiences of sex workers and people of color would be a terrible mistake, morally as well as creatively.
We consequently do not know how Franco’s Zola would be received. Would it be a painfully hilarious crowd-pleaser like The Disaster Artist or make no cultural impact whatsoever, like every other movie Franco has directed?
Zola works spectacularly as an actor’s showcase specifically because it never feels like it was designed to show off the heavyweight chops of its cast. Sonny, in sharp contrast, fails miserably as an actor’s showcase precisely because everything about it is designed to direct attention to the deafening, high-intensity exertions of ACTORS ACTING up a storm.
For example one of protagonist Sonny’s defining characteristics is his propensity to explode with rage when he feels he’s being disrespected and begin breaking everything in sight. Within the context of the movie there’s a certain logic in Sonny being quiet and reserved the vast majority of the time, but giving into the seething rage at his core intermittently.
But Sonny’s habitual freak outs don’t feel remotely organic. Instead they feel like gifts from screenwriter John Carlen and director Cage to Franco as an actor, a continual opportunity to show the world just how much explosive charisma and magnetism this Franco kid has. Brando-level charisma! The magnetism of a young Nicolas Cage at his sexiest and most intense!
Or at least that’s the idea. Here’s the thing: Franco does have enormous charisma. He does have magnetism. He was the star of Freaks and Geeks, after all. Have you SEEN him on that show? If not, stop reading this article, and watch all of Freaks and Geeks. I will be here when you get back.
The problem is that Sonny makes consistently terrible use of Franco’s gifts. It exists as an excuse for the ACTORS in its cast to strut their stuff. Alas, Sonny is never phonier or less compelling than when its cast are strutting their stuff.
Even more than Franco, no one struts their stuff in Sonny as melodramatically and disastrously than Brenda Blethyn as Sonny’s mother Jewel, a mean-spirited madam who talks in a New Orleans drawl so thick and borderline incomprehensible that it sometimes feels like she’s delivering her lines with a mouth full of gumbo and Hurricanes.
Blethyn doesn’t just ACT in Sonny, she over-acts egregiously, transforming Sonny’s psychotic mama into history’s greatest monster, a sordid Oedipal cartoon of craven greed and lip-smacking amorality.
She’s a crazed caricature of maternal malice who never misses an opportunity to inform her flesh and blood that his only gift in this sick, sad world is for selling that sweet, sweet dick to grateful old ladies for mommy and that he better not get above his raisin’ and start reading them fancy books when he should be rocking sexy seniors’ world in exchange for cold hard cash.
Sonny wants to go straight by taking an army buddy up on an offer to work in his daddy’s bookstore down in Texas, but in the grubby world of Sonny, where squares and hustlers inhabit such impossibly dissimilar universes that they might as well be different species, this qualifies as an impossible dream that of course must melodramatically fall apart.
Our angry anti-hero keeps finding himself getting pulled back further and further into his old life peddling flesh for mama. The more this sweet-dicked young stud sells himself to old women, the more he hates himself, the more he drinks and the more he despairs of ever being able to leave hustling behind.
Poor Mena Suvari is wasted in the thankless role of Carol, a painfully cliched hooker with a heart of gold who pines for the straight life of a mother and wife and non-prostitute, and desperately hopes that Sonny can be her vehicle to a white picket fence suburban existence.
Sonny alternates between deafening explosions of melodrama and shouting and moments of quiet and contemplation. These quiet moments are infinitely more engaging and real than all of the shouting largely because they tend to center on the one legitimately great, heartbreaking aspect of an otherwise aggressively bad, appallingly fake movie: Harry Dean Stanton as Henry, a thief, drunk and all-around layabout who hangs around Jewel and acts as a drunken, dissolute, degenerate father figure towards Sonny but nurses a dark secret. Which is of course that he’s Sonny’s real father, which is something that he learns only after the older man dies in a wildly excessive car crash.
Unlike his cast-mates, Stanton finds the reality and specificity as well as the depth and pathos in a man who has been shambling along aimlessly for so long that he barely even noticed his sad, wasted lifetime passing him by.
I was both surprised and not surprised to discover that Sonny is semi-autobiographical and that its screenwriter based it on his own experiences as a hustler growing up and being part of the family business because the movie feels utterly fake.
With the exception of Stanton’s achingly real, human performance, I didn’t believe a goddamn thing about Sonny. Somewhere between Carlen’s hardscrabble real-life experiences and the silver screen everything devolved into hokey bullshit.
Along with its pouty, tortured protagonist Sonny bottoms out with an appearance by its director as Acid Yellow, the eccentric, cane-wielding, sartorially spectacular pimp of a brothel where men pay extra for rough trade.
Despondent over Henry’s death and the revelation that he was his father, Sonny gets blackout drunk and agrees to sell himself for Acid Yellow for the first time.
In a crazy alternate universe where Sonny works and the filmmakers succeeded in making exactly the movie they set out to make—a gritty, powerful coming of age story that doubles as a 1970s-style character study about tragic outsiders on the fringes of society chasing the American dream—Nicolas Cage’s cameo as Acid Yellow would be every bit as distracting as the thirty seconds of jibber-jabber about the awesomeness of Limp Bizkit Fred Durst inexplicably included in The Fanatic.
If we were emotionally engaged in Sonny’s spiritual and emotional journey seeing one of our biggest movie stars in a get-up that suggests he told the costume designer that he wanted to look like Tony Clifton, Austin Powers, Humpty Hump and Willie Wonka all at the same time, but gay and on acid, would pull us right out of the movie.
The campy outrageousness of Cage’s get-up, which somehow exceeds the crazed excess of his wardrobe in Deadfall, would make it impossible to think about anything other than the Oscar-winner’s very big, very bold and sometimes very wrong choices as an artist and a man.
Then again, you can’t be pulled out of a movie that never pulls you in.
Like way too many films of this ilk, Sonny sees a straight man choosing to let another man put his penis inside him in exchange for money as the ultimate degradation, the final, truest sign that he has lost his way.
Sonny agrees to some rough stuff with a wealthy insurance executive we are assured is Acid Yellow’s best customer but once he’s inside the room alone with the client, Sonny’s rage comes rushing to the surface and he beats the shit out of the poor man in a violent outburst the movie feels way too inclined to forgive and dismiss as Sonny’s feelings once again getting the best of him in ways he can neither understand or control.
When Sonny attempts to flee the scene of the hate crime he just committed Acid Yellow explodes and yells to his goons “Cut him! Cut his face!” to the accompaniment of “A Fifth of Beethoven”, Walter Murphy’s disco update of the legendary composer’s Symphony Number 5.
Film fans will of course recognize “A Fifth of Beethoven” as one of the dance floor anthems of the gazillion-selling Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The juxtaposition of music from possibly John Travolta’s best film and performance and the unexpected introduction of Nicolas Cage creates a weird Face/Off reunion of sorts made all the more distracting by Cage coming very close to yelling to his henchmen that he wants them to cut Sonny’s pretty face off.
As the only film Cage has ever directed, Sonny is obviously a story that spoke to Cage on a soul-deep level but his muddled mess of a melodrama fails to convey what he found so compelling about Carlen’s overwrought screenplay and life story.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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