The Forger is a Dreary Downer That Horrifically Miscasts John Travolta as a Cold Grey Blob of a Man
Funny, this sure doesn't LOOK like a bad, boring movie!
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
I am perpetually gobsmacked by the myriad ways the careers of Face/Off stars Nicolas Cage and John Travolta overlap and mirror each other. To cite just one of a seemingly infinite number of examples, about a decade back Travolta and Cage both starred in movies where they played ex-convict dads whose problems only really start after they leave prison and are forced to commit crimes at the behest of low-life criminal scum they had the misfortune to work with before an extended stay in the big house.
The crucial difference is that Cage’s 2012 thriller Stolen plays this premise for goofy laughs, fun and wild action while the 2014 Travolta vehicle The Forger opts for dreary drama.
Where Stolen has a light touch and winning sense of humor about itself and its own ridiculousness, The Forger takes itself very seriously, to its detriment. It’s pure miserablism, a stone-cold bummer that unwisely forces Travolta to ACT instead of letting him have fun and be fun.
As we’ve established over the course of this journey, the crucial difference between Cage and Travolta is that Cage is a great actor and a true artist, one of the very best. Travolta, meanwhile, is a great entertainer and a great movie star but not someone who disappears into roles.
Travolta is consequently painfully miscast as Raymond J. Cutter, a cold grey survivor devoid of charisma, humor and magnetism and cursed with blonde highlights and a hideous soul patch. Raymond begins the movie in prison before he makes what we are led to believe is a very bad decision to get released early.
That’s because in order to become a free man, the second generation criminal must make a Faustian bargain with the crook who sent him to the big house in the first place. The titular forger doesn’t know exactly what he must do in exchange for his freedom, not unlike how Nicolas Cage’s character didn’t know what favor he would be asked to perform in exchange for the murder of his wife’s rapist in Seeking Justice.
Raymond wants to get out of prison so that he can spend time with his son Will (Tye Sheridan) before his only child dies of Cancer. The grizzled ex-convict ends up agreeing to forge a copy of Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son for a very wealthy collector and then steal the actual painting from the National Gallery of Art.
Raymond’s con artist father Joseph (Christopher Plummer) has been looking after the dying teenager in his son’s absence because the boy’s mother is too busy being addicted to various hard drugs to be present in her son’s life.
Will doesn’t want to go back to his criminal ways and understandably does not trust the monster who had him put away by snitching on him but he’s run out of options and time.
In an effort to connect with his son, Raymond offers to grant him three wishes, one of which involves helping his fifteen year old son lose his virginity. In another, less dour movie, this might be the source of humor, ribald or otherwise but The Forger does not have a sense of humor, or laughs, or levity. So Raymond helping his son get laid is handled as grimly as every other aspect of the film, which reminded me of the kind of dim downers that play Sundance every year in the worst possible way.
In its third act The Forger morphs inevitably into a heist film. It turns out that what Will actually wants to do, other than relieve himself of his cursed virginity, is to get into the family business and help his pops and granddad commit a felony.
So three generations of Cutter men join forces to pull off the big switcheroo with cops hot on their trail. The theft of the Monet should be the film’s riveting climax. Instead it feels like an afterthought, as does everything that follows.
The Forger resembles Stolen in another crucial way as well. A cartoon version of N’Awlins wasn’t just a major character in Stolen; it was pretty much the main character. The same is true of The Forger and Boston.
The only way The Forger could be more Boston would be if Ben Affleck lingered in the periphery of every scene, wearing a Wade Boggs jersey and eating baked beans straight from a tin can. But where Stolen’s campy local flavor was a big part of what makes it so much fun, making the film as Boston-centric as possible is yet another heavy-handed move that does not pay off in any way.
Travolta is defeated by a wrong he’s all wrong for but Plummer gives his lifelong criminal roguish charm and Sheridan is moving as a boy who has only just begun to live yet is nonetheless staring down death.
In another borderline eerie coincidence, just a year before The Forger was panned by critics and politely ignored by the public Sheridan played by a lonely kid who forges an emotional connection with a criminal father figure opposite Cage in David Gordon Green’s Joe.
The key difference is that Joe is a legitimately great film that features one of Cage’s deepest and most memorable late-period performances while The Forger is just as forgettable as its title. It fails as entertainment as well as art.
No matter how you look at it, Cage triumphs over Travolta, both in this phase of their respective careers and overall.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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