With 2013's Joe, Nicolas Cage and David Gordon Green Did Some of the Best Work of Their Extraordinary, Extraordinarily Checkered Careers
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.
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Watching Nicolas Cage in David Gordon Green’s Joe I found myself day-dreaming about an alternate universe where Cage started acting in the late 1960s instead of the early 1980s.
As impressive as Cage’s career has been, I can’t help but fantasize about a world where Cage might play Sonny Corleone in his his uncle adaptation of Mario Puzo’s lurid best-seller The Godfather and plenty of other juicy roles from my favorite period of American film.
“Before the casting was finalized, Nicolas Cage had lunch with Terrence Malick in Hollywood in February 1996. Malick went off to scout locations and tried calling Cage that summer only to find out that his phone number had been disconnected” reads a particularly fascinating, heartbreaking entry in the IMDB trivia for The Thin Red Line.
Cage consequently came tantalizingly close to reuniting with John Travolta and collaborating with Terence Malick. That frustratingly did not happen so the closest Cage will likely come to acting in a Terence Malick film is his starring role in Joe, David Gordon Green’s masterful 2013 adaptation of Larry Brown’s novel of sin and redemption.
David Gordon Green famously began his career as a baby Terence Malick. Green channeled the legendary director of Badlands and Days of Heaven in early arthouse favorites like George Washington, All the Real Girls and Undertow, which Malick himself produced.
Then Green’s career took a very weird, unexpected but welcome turn when Malick’s creative heir went mainstream in a big way with the hit 2008 stoner comedy Pineapple Express. It was followed by two infinitely lesser lowbrow romps, the unwatchable fantasy stoner comedy Your Highness and the deeply forgettable Jonah Hill vehicle The Sitter.
In 2013 Green returned joyously to his roots ripping off Terence Malick with Joe and Prince Avalanche, another small-scale delight about a side of American life seldom seen onscreen.
Green went back to making personal movies with a look and feel and texture all their own, grubby little movies about desperate outsiders living on the fringes of society who form an unlikely but supportive surrogate family.
In Joe Cage plays the title character. He’s a grizzled, bearded ex-convict who struggles mightily to contain the ugliness and brutality inside him. Joe runs an otherwise all-black crew of laborers who poison trees for developers and bears the scars, physical and otherwise, of a hardscrabble existence.
He’s a hard-ass with a soft spot for Gary Jones (Tye Sheridan), a 15 year old living in fear of his father Wade (Gary Poulter), an alcoholic homeless man capable of unconscionable rage and brutality as well as unexpected tenderness.
Poulter was not an actor when he was cast in the third most central role in Joe. He’d been an extra on Thirtysomething in the 1980s but otherwise seemed to have lived a life perilously close to the character he plays here.
The tragic scene-stealer died at fifty-three of acute ethanol intoxication two months before Joe was released to rave reviews, particularly for Cage and Poulter.
Was Green exploiting Poulter and his ragged real-life despair to lend his arthouse downer an uncomfortable, queasy-making element of verisimilitude? Or was he giving a lost man’s life dignity and meaning with a role that transformed his pain and suffering into art? I can’t rightly say for sure. Perhaps no one can.
Green sought out non-professionals specifically because they bring something different to the table than professional actors. They lend a distinct texture, grit and personality to the film, a sense of realism and authenticity that has nothing to do with professionalism or polish.
Joe gives Sheridan’s physically and emotionally abused but good-hearted teen a desperately needed job working for him. He tries to employ Wade as well but the bad dad has no interest in a paycheck if hard work, self-control and sobriety are involved.
Joe surveys a miserablist Southern Gothic realm at once bracing in its savageness and strangely beautiful. It takes place in the kind of backwards small towns that are decades behind the time where technology is concerned.
When Joe gives his grateful teenage protege a job a glimmer of light enters his otherwise bleak, pitch-black existence, possibly for the first time. Joe wants to do good and be good and sees, in his relationship with the lost teenager, an opportunity to make a positive difference in someone else’s life.
I’ve written extensively about this phase of Cage’s career being dominated by roles about fatherhood. Joe is a father and a grandfather in Joe but more importantly he’s a supportive, encouraging father figure to his youngest worker.
Joe is not about the forces of darkness and forces of light battling for the soul and control of a vulnerable, earnest young man. It’s much darker than that. It is, instead, about Joe, a force of darkness and rage no matter how hard he tries to transcend his inherent nature, battling even more malevolent forces in the form of Wade and Willie Russell (Ronnie Gene Blevins), a small time criminal with a grudge against Joe and Gary.
Joe begins as a character study deeply immersed in the gritty details of life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder but in its third act it attains an unmistakable sense of urgency as Joe and his enemies embark on a collision course they may not survive.
Cage has said that the role of Joe is the closest to him personality-wise of any character he’s played. While it might seem strange for the world-famous Academy-Award winning scion of a legendary acting dynasty to identify so strongly with an ex-con tree poisoner with a net worth in the low double digits, there’s no distance between Cage the movie star and the desperate, hopeless character he’s playing.
It’s a performance of total and complete conviction that ranks among the finest turns in Cage’s extraordinary career. Cage has made a LOT of bad movies but Joe proved once again that even during the lean years the actor was capable of greatness.
Joe might not have done much for Cage professionally or made much at the box-office but that was never the point. With Joe, a director and an actor in need of a comeback and creative redemption created something wonderful and pure and true. They stopped being entertainers chasing checks and went back to being artists creating transcendent, timeless art.
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