The Trust Is an Overachieving Sleeper With Nicolas Cage as a sort of Psychotic Corrupt Cop Version of Ned Flanders
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
If I can peel back the curtain on Travolta/Cage for a moment, sometimes when we have a particularly grim-looking line-up of films to discuss we won’t even try to get a guest of the episode.
We like our guests and want them to enjoy being on our show and we are all too aware that Nicolas Cage and John Travolta have made a LOT of bad movies. They’re literally synonymous with stinkers.
That was the case with the next episode that Clint and and I will record on Dog Eat Dog and The Trust, both of which were released in 2016 to mixed reviews and non-existent box-office.
I naturally assumed that if Nicolas Cage had made a crime movie with Paul Schrader and Willem Dafoe adapted from an Edward Bunker novel and it was any damn good at all, people would know. It would have a cult. It would have a reputation. People would be talking about it, particularly Nicolas Cage super-fans who have a special place in their heart for the Schrader-penned Bringing Out the Dead.
I felt the same way about The Trust. If Nicolas Cage had made a heist movie opposite Elijah Wood and featuring one of Jerry Lewis’ final performances then it too would have at least a small but devoted cult.
I’d like to say that I walk into every movie blind, without preconceptions or expectations but that’s obviously not true. I expected Dog Eat Dog and The Trust to be some combination of bad, forgettable and generic.
But hope springs eternal every time I start a new Nicolas Cage or John Travolta movie and I am pleased to report that Dog Eat Dog and The Trust are both legitimately good, entertaining movies with wonderful performances by Nicolas Cage, his co-leads and terrific supporting casts.
It does not help that Cage’s secretly good movies tend to look an awful lot like his bad ones from the outside. It’s easy to see how people could get 2014’s godawful Rage, where Cage played a vicious career criminal who leads a trio of brutish thugs in various criminal endeavors confused with 2016’s nifty, underrated Dog Eat Dog, where Cage also plays a vicious career criminal who leads a trio of brutish thugs in various criminal endeavors.
I didn’t know much about The Trust going in but that ended up working in my favor. At this point I’ve seen probably ninety percent of the hundreds of movies that Cage has made. Yet I still find myself surprised and delighted by the choices he makes.
At Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project we have the Bad Hair Rule: if Cage or Travolta have egregiously bad hairstyles and appalling facial hair then the movie they’re starring in will probably suck.
That does not apply to The Trust. Cage’s Supercuts hairstyle, regrettable sideburns and dorky dad mustache are crucial to the character of veteran cop Stone. They define him.
Stone leads a solitary life here. He does not have a wife or children or many friends but he nevertheless seems more like a dad than ninety-nine percent of real movie fathers.
It’s the hair. It’s the mustache. It’s the corny dad jokes. It’s the goofy personality and weird obsessiveness.
Dads have to have a project. Stone has a doozy. He’s discovered a building that contains a fortune in illicit drug money locked away in a safe inside of an industrial freezer.
Stone makes liberating the loot from the freezer his life’s goal and recruits fellow cop Waters (Elijah Wood) to help him.
Stone may not have any actual children but he plays a role in Waters’ life that combines older brother, dorky dad and the demon on his shoulder beckoning him to come over to the dark side.
Waters knows that robbing drug dealers is dangerous business but he’s bored and hates his job so he goes along with a plan he knows will probably result in his violent demise out of boredom, friendship and a lack of anything better to do.
Wood and Cage are a study in contrasts. Cage’s corrupt cop is laser-focused on getting to that fortune in drug money. The Trust gives Cage another juicy opportunity to play an obsessive, someone whose life revolves around a single fixation to the exclusion of everything else.
Wood’s slacker does not care about anything. He’s drifting aimlessly without much in the way of direction or purpose before what appears to be his only friend gives him something big to focus on.
We see the movie through Wood’s eyes. The Lord of the Rings star has big, beautiful, expressive blue eyes that silently but powerfully convey the mounting desperation and fear he’s experiencing as an already dangerous plan begins to spiral out of control.
Think of Ned Flanders as an obsessive criminal who also happens to be a cop and you have a good sense of Cage’s character. He’s not a geek or a nerd but he is a dork through and through. He can’t not be a dork even in the darkest of situations.
The tricky thing about Cage’s performance and character is that he seems very nice before he starts murdering people. Waters knows that there is something deeply wrong with Stone but he unwisely and incorrectly thinks that he can handle his friend and keep him from getting in so deep that it becomes impossible to ever get out.
The first two acts of The Trust establishes that its leads lives of quiet desperation they are desperate to escape by any means possible and sets up the heist. The third act is dedicated to a heist that starts out strange, tense and eerie and takes a turn towards the surreal when our anti-heroes finally break into the freezer and it’s like a criminal limbo or circle of hell.
In one of his most overlooked and underrated performances Cage is a singular, darkly funny combination of corny and psychotic, avuncular and unhinged.
He’s the kind of weirdo who will stop during a particularly tense moment in a heist to make an awful pun or talk about how the hamburger place he frequents has changed their recipe but he approves.
Wood and Cage make for an unlikely but inspired team in a darkly funny, thoroughly engaging little sleeper that leaped deliriously over my very modest expectations for it.
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