The 2017 Stinker Inconceivable Began Life as a Lindsay Lohan Vehicle But Bombed as Just Another Nicolas Cage 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
Before it became just another Nicolas Cage movie Inconceivable was going to be a Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle. The unfortunate thing about Lohan’s career as an adult actress is that she makes so few films and they all perform so poorly that every movie is a potential comeback movie because the poor woman has so much to come back from.
Inconceivable was announced by Lohan at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. She wasn’t just going to play the lead role of a deranged surrogate parent who kills moms and dads so that she can steal their children; she was going to produce as well.
It would, theoretically, be a marked departure for Lohan. The former Disney child star would be playing a sociopath and a schemer but that doesn’t seem like too much of a departure from her role in her previous film, the poorly received Paul Schrader/Bret Easton Ellis collaboration The Canyons.
In a poignant article from the time, Lohan talked about how she’d love to snag actresses like Juliette Lewis and Jessica Lange for the project. In the same article Randall Emmett, the notorious “Geezer teaser” behind some of Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, Robert De Niro and John Travolta’s worst and most mercenary movies bragged that audiences would be “really shocked when they see Lindsay take this role on” and called her “one of the greatest young actresses of her generation.”
When I watch a Miramax movies these days and see Harvey Weinstein’s name pop up in the credits I invariably think, “That’s the real villain.” Weinstein may thankfully never appear onscreen but his odious spirit pervades everything he touches, and, by touching, taints.
The same is true of Randall Emmett, who is just a horrible human being and the catalyst behind so many movies that did not need to be made, such as the 2017 thriller Inconceivable.
Alas, being, in the mind of Randall Emmett at least, one of the greatest young actresses of her generation was not, ultimately, enough to score her the lead role in a five million dollar low budget thriller.
On his Facebook page Jonathan Baker, the film’s director, explained, “As for Lindsay Lohan not being a part of Inconceivable..... The fans deserve to know, I loved her for the part of Katie. I fought for her to the very end. Sadly the studio has the final say and they just did not want to go in that direction. I think Lindsay is a very good actress.”
Baker reportedly approached a number of major actresses. He offered them millions but they all said no so he decided to change tactics and offer some of those millions to Nicolas Cage to play the thankless role of the husband of a woman terrorized by an evil surrogate.
Instead of Lindsay Lohan or a big name actress the lead role of Katie went to Nicky Whelan, an Australian actress who previously acted alongside Cage in Dog Eat Dog and Left Behind.
It was a choice and a compromise that seemingly pleased no one. The studio was undoubtedly worried about Lohan behaving in an unprofessional manner that would cost the production time and money. They were clearly concerned that she might not show up to set and if she did, she may or may not be sober but even a sub-par performance from Lohan would be a step up from the forgettable work done by Whelan in what is an impossible role.
Inconceivable opens with Katie killing a man. There is supposed to be some ambiguity as to whether or not she’s acting in self-defense but from the very start it is apparent that there is something very wrong with Katie, and that it involves murder, subterfuge, kidnapping, psychotic jealousy and hot lesbian sex. It’s almost impressive that Inconceivable manages to be so boring considering the explosive elements at its core.
Four years later Katie has a four year old daughter named Cora who befriends Maddie, the four year old daughter of doctor couple Brian (Nicolas Cage) and Angela (Gina Gershon).
Brian’s mother Donna (Faye Dunaway) immediately sizes up Katie as an amoral grifter not to be trusted. Dunaway, incidentally, broke her leg shortly before filming so her role was re-written on the fly so that her character is seated throughout the entire film.
Katie never gives anyone any reason to trust her beyond being blandly attractive and reasonably pleasant when she wants something. Yet Angela opens her home and her life to her all the same because there would be no film if Angela didn’t have such inconceivably terrible judgment.
When Angela miscarries, she invites Katie to live in their guest house so that she can be a part time nanny to her daughter. When Katie learns that Brian and Angela want Linda, her lesbian lover, to be the surrogate for their second child Katie murders her at the beach to prevent that from happening.
Angela figures out that Katie is not who she seems to be. Like a distaff version of Terry O’Quinn’s iconic family annihilator in The Stepfather, she holds mothers to impossible standards and is ready, even eager, to murder moms she considers insufficiently involved in their children’s lives.
As a kidnapper, murderer, manipulator and liar Katie isn’t really one to stand in sour judgment of others but she is both evil and insane and consequently not terribly reasonable.
At one point Angela thinks her husband is having sex with the hot new nanny but that passes quickly once she learns that the person she saw her nanny having sex with was a woman.
They get along so well! Look at those sincere smiles!
On one level I do not know what Cage is doing in a nothing role in a terrible film. On another, I know exactly what he’s doing: picking up a big old paycheck for a week’s work.
Angela’s growing conviction that the sketchy con artist who has wormed her way into her family’s lives is bad news leads people to think that she, a doctor, mother and wife that they know well, is insane and having drug-inspired delusions while Angela, an enigmatic loner nobody knows anything about, is sane and reasonable and right.
Katie ends up stabbing herself in a bid to make Angela look bad but it takes DNA results for Brian to finally believe his wife over the sketchy loner she has accused, rightly, of trying to take over her life.
Inconceivable is star-studded by late-period Cage standards. This marks the first time Cage and Gershon have shared a screen since Face/Off and it is Academy Award winning screen legends Dunaway and Cage’s only collaboration.
It does not matter. Except for the most important role Inconceivable has an A-list cast but the chintzy soul of a made for television movie.
Inconceivable isn’t just beneath the dignity of Cage and Dunaway; it’s beneath Lohan’s dignity as well.
Subscribe to the EveryEpisodeEver newsletter here
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here