A Score to Settle is More Serious Than Most of Nicolas Cage's Recent Vehicles Until Ghosts Enter the Equation
In the most recent piece I wrote for The Travolta/Cage Project I complained about the many, many films Cage has made in the last fifteen years where he has played a father haunted by the death of a son or daughter.
It feels like Cage plays a dad mad with grief because of the massive hole in his soul left by a child’s early death in half of his movies these days. That was true of Between Worlds. It was true of Inconceivable. And (SPOILER!) it’s true of the muted 2019 character study A Score to Settle.
The otherwise straightforward drama of sin and redemption turns on Cage’s sad dad literally being haunted by his son’s death in that he spends the first half of the film trying to redeem himself in the eyes of what turns out to be his son’s ghost.
Yes, ghost. That might sound spectacularly silly but it’s handled in such a serious, even dour manner that the introduction of supernatural elements feels both jarring and wrong.
A Score to Settle is yet another late-period Nicolas Cage movie where he plays a criminal out for revenge but it’s slower, sadder and more grounded than Cage’s usual fare from this era.
So the fact that one of the main characters turns out to be a supernatural spirit and not a flesh and blood human being with agency and a social security number undermines its gravity ever so slightly.
Cage is uncharacteristically subdued as Frank Carver. He’s a career criminal who took the fall for his mob bosses and was only supposed to do a five or six year bid but he ended up doing a nearly two decade stint in the big house.
Frank has a terrible case of insomnia that could kill him. That puzzlingly ceases to be particularly important beyond lending an already sad and existentially exhausted survivor an additional element of fatalism and world weariness.
When Frank gets out of the big house he is greeted by son Joey (Noah Le Gros), who is still a little salty about his old man spending his entire childhood in the slammer making baseball bats, weirdly enough.
Frank is filled with guilt and shame as well as a genuine, sincere desire to start life anew and redeem himself in the eyes of a son who is his lasting legacy but also someone he has disappointed in a manner that’s unforgivable.
Cage occupies such a larger than life place in American pop culture and American film as our preeminent method madman and living meme that it can be easy to forget that beyond being an icon, a meme, a man and a myth Nicolas Cage is also an actor.
He’s damn good at it, too! He even has an Academy Award for acting and everything. We’re talking Best Actor, baby! Not that pity Best “Supporting” Actor horse shit.
Nicolas Cage the mad man of memes and movies starred in Between Worlds but Nicolas Cage the actor starred in A Score to Settle.
It’s not much of a movie but it gives Cage a lot to work with as a serious dramatic actor and he handles it all skillfully. A Score to Settle might look and feel like a lot of the movies Cage made around this time where he played a cop or a crook in search of redemption or a big score but there’s a sense of quiet to the film that sets it apart.
Looks like fun!
A Score to Settle at least attempts to tell a very human story about a very flawed man’s attempts to make up for nineteen years of loneliness and abandonment with a spending spree funded by a small fortune Frank retrieves when he leaves the penitentiary.
The ex-convict is tragically new to fatherhood and eager to make up for lost time with a son who still holds him at arm’s lengths and does not know whether he can trust him or whether he’ll leave him all over again.
There is a great vulnerability at the core of Cage’s alternately tender and enraged performance rooted in his character’s overwhelming sense of guilt over not being there for his troubled son when he desperately needed him.
Frank wants his son to forgive him and is willing to spend any amount of ill-gotten loot to make that happen. Cage gets deep inside the aging skin of a weary old soul who is exhausted from a hard life full of unthinkable compromises, many of which hurt his son more than anyone else.
Le Gros has good chemistry with Cage. It’s easy to buy them as father and son and their bond, at once tenuous and deep, feels real.
Cage buries his charisma, flash and magnetism to play a quiet man who just wants to be left alone so that he can at least try to make things right. We’ve talked a lot here about how the key difference between Cage and John Travolta, beyond Cage being the much more impressive figure with a much better body of work, is that Travolta is a movie star. He doesn’t disappear into roles; roles disappear inside his huge persona. Cage is also a movie star but more importantly he is an actor capable of fully inhabiting a wide variety of characters, many of which, regrettably but inevitably, are either law enforcement officers or enthusiast lawbreakers.
In direct-to-streaming mode Cage seemingly plays nothing but cops and crooks. A Score to Settle once again casts Cage as a man for whom crime isn’t just a vocation or a profession but rather his identity but it at least gives him more to do than run around with a gun chasing the good guys or the bad guys.
A Score to Settle’s key distinction is that it is fundamentally serious and perversely light on action in its first half.
In its second half A Score to Settle grows less serious and more action-heavy. That’s because, and I hope this doesn’t qualify as a bonus spoiler, Nicolas Cage’s character has a score to settle.
In its third act Frank visits his dead wife’s grave and is surprised to discover Joey’s grave as well. He then realizes that he has been Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs all along, as well as nuttier than a squirrel’s diet and crazier than a shit house rat.
Frank’s boy didn’t make it nearly to his twenties despite parental abandonment and problems with drugs and the law. No, Joey was instead murdered by the same criminal associates Frank went to prison for nearly twenty years to protect.
It is at that point that A Score to Settle stops being different and becomes more or less like every other movie Cage has made where he has to murder a whole bunch of people to get revenge.
It’s hard to be a film of substance when the character with the second most screen time and the second most important role turns out to be a specter from the spirit world.
A Score to Settle is at first purposefully, deliberately serious and somber but by the end it’s every bit as silly as Cage’s more light-hearted efforts from this regrettable stage in his career.
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