The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Bruce Willis
One of the reasons why I wanted to watch and write about the seven movies Bruce Willis made in 2021 for my Talking About Bruno project is because it seemed analogous to the glorious journey of discovery and mortification that is The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast.
Two years ago Cage and Willis were unfortunately in pretty much the same place professionally. They were both formerly massive, A-list, household name superstars and boffo box-office attractions reduced to cranking out a steady stream of interchangeable direct-to-streaming cheapies just to pay the bills.
The difference is that Cage is still capable of greatness. He’s still big. It was the pictures that got small. For reasons that are now tragically apparent, Willis chose projects so dire that it would be impossible for him to do good work in them, let alone great.
In a sad but not particularly surprising development, it turns out that Willis chose roles that would be small and unchallenging enough for him to perform for a very good, very depressing reason.
Willis suffering from a condition called Aphasia, a malady that affects memory and communication. It’s not that Willis didn’t want to do meaty, substantive, challenging roles: he appeared to be physically and psychologically incapable of roles that called for anything more than a day or two of shooting.
Willis announced his retirement from acting and we as a culture were once again reminded what a huge role he has played in pop culture and in all of our lives.
I’m struck by the commonalities between Cage and Willis’ late-period careers. This is particularly true of Cage’s newest movie, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
The meta crowd-pleaser is famously an irreverent meditation on the life, career and cult of Nicolas Cage but it seems to be about Willis as well.
In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage is offered one million dollars by a Spanish fan played by Pedro Pascal to attend his birthday. One million dollars is a LOT of money for anyone, even a rich, famous movie star.
In his final films Willis made a million dollars a day for just a few hours work, which is simultaneously depressing and impressive.
Willis famously retired from acting. InThe Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage does the same thing. In its clever deconstruction of action movies, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent reminded me a lot of Kevin Hart and John Travolta’s Quibi hit Die Hart, a project Willis passed on for reasons that now make a whole lot more sense.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent closes with one of my all-time favorite songs, Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart.”
It’s a song Zevon wrote while he was dying about how he would like to be remembered and appreciated. It is, in other words, a song with much more relevance to Willis’ life and career than Cage’s.
Cage is only 58, and in the midst of a major comeback whereas Willis, like Zevon when he wrote and recorded “Keep Me in Your Heart”, is staring down personal and professional mortality.
Cage gets his happy ending in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Things aren’t anywhere near as rosy for Willis but the silver lining of his terrible condition is that it allows us to let him know just how much we remember and appreciate him.
With the exception of Grindhouse, Willis and Cage have remarkably never appeared in a movie together but they otherwise have a whole lot in common, like the enduring love of the moviegoing public.
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