I went to see Osgood Perkins’s creepy thriller Longlegs Sunday night, at the tail end of a long weekend during which the $10 million movie made $22.6 million, a record for distributor Neon, and I was struck by the audience reaction whenever Nicolas Cage appeared as the title character. People leaned forward a little. Plot-guessing and other side chatter ceased. And for the next couple of minutes, or however long Cage was onscreen, Longlegs was all about his creative choices in relation to the film — choices that we know from decades of watching Cage will not be made with our comfort in mind.
The character of Longlegs is not spectacularly gross or overtly “designed.†He’s one of those omniscient-seeming, cop-taunting, only-in-the-movies serial-killer types, but odder looking than most. His swollen lips and nose and ashy off-white skin make him look as if he’s either very unhealthy or recently deceased. You don’t see Longlegs’s entire face in the prologue, but Cage got the audience lean-in there as well. He got it every time Longlegs appeared and always rewarded the attention by adding a new, unsettling detail to the character, whether it was a clenched, bobbling walk, an earnest but out-of-tune singing voice, a scary-grandma falsetto, or a cackle that was partly a shriek.
As the final credits rolled — after a “curtain call†appearance by Longlegs that’s the movie version of Vincent Price’s coda laugh at the end of “Thriller†— it occurred to me that Cage has taught people a lot about acting in the time he’s been doing it. He’s someone who publicly ruminates on art more deeply than most actors are willing to (or are capable of), discussing the history and importance of performance and all the different ways one can practice it. At 60, Cage has built a second identity as an amateur arts educator, giving interviews wherein he defends his own work in ways that make it safe for viewers to enjoy performances that aren’t striving to be subtle, realistic, “naturalistic,†or otherwise small.
Cage has also used his accumulated name recognition to seed the moviemaking landscape to be more hospitable to actors like himself. On top of all the direct-to-video action and crime films he’s made (mainly to pay down debts), plus occasional appearances in Hollywood blockbusters, he has done fascinating lower-budget, category-agnostic personal films, so many that he’s become a unique kind of quality-assurance label — one that says, “Whatever you think of this movie, you’ll come away thinking Nicolas Cage was interesting in it.†In doing so, he’s gained new and appreciative audiences via midnight showings and the circulation of memes.
It’s not crazy to think he’s trained (or retrained) some part of the movie-watching public to be more open-minded in general when evaluating quality acting, encouraging them to prize factors other than delicacy. (Cage can do subtle, by the way, even when a performance is otherwise styled as BIG; think of his thoughtful, warm voice-overs in Raising Arizona or his delivery of the snowfall monologue in Moonstruck.) Whether contemplating his suitably hard-boiled voice work as Spider-Man Noir in the Spider-Verse movies; his existentially disappointed character in Pig, somewhere between an indie drama and a parable; the gothic action-horror excess of Mandy, origin point for the Nicolas-Cage-bathed-in-blood image now available in T-shirt and pin form; the exuberant over-the-topness of Cage’s Dracula in the vampire comedy Reinfield; the ripped-from-the-spleen creepiness of his lead performance in the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space; or the Adaptation-like meta-play of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (as “Nicolas Cage,†a has-been who is taunted by his younger self), audiences seem more inclined to take each new work on its own terms.
In the ’80s through the aughts, Cage’s go-for-broke-and-borrow-more performances were alternately praised for defining Face/Off and Leaving Las Vegas and knocked for unbalancing his uncle Francis Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married, the horror satire Vampire’s Kiss (a.k.a. the one in which he ate a cockroach), Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man, and Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (the movie where he yells, “Shoot him again! His soul’s still dancin’!â€). Sometimes Cage got dinged for giving a performance that stood out because it was unlike anything else in that movie in a jarring way (such as his swaggering pilot in the Top Gun knockoff Firebirds, which feels like a hangover from the horny, karate-kicking, Elvis-meets-Brando performance he gave in his previous project, Wild at Heart). But more often, anti-Cage pushback seemed like an allergic reaction against the very idea that if you catch somebody acting, that means it’s bad acting. I can’t imagine Citizen Kane without Joseph Cotten’s twinkly-eyed, cornball “Old Man†performance under heavy makeup as the elderly incarnation of Jedediah Leland.
This kind of calculatedly tone-clashing performance is always risky. When it doesn’t work, it’s like releasing a ferret in a beauty parlor. But when it does work, it’s like releasing a ferret in a beauty parlor. What’s the distinction between a big performance that works and one that doesn’t? You know it when you see it, even if others disagree, and the disagreement gives the performance a juice it might not otherwise have had. Cage’s performance in Peggy Sue as the heroine’s petulant, adenoidal, terminally ungrateful high-school boyfriend turned disappointing husband divides audiences to this day. It’s woe-is-me rock-and-roll played on a kazoo. His first major performance right after that, as H.I. McDonough in Raising Arizona, is mostly beloved now, even though it’s no smaller than his work in Peggy Sue. He conceived of the character as “an outlaw Woody Woodpecker.â€
Cage has further described his acting as, variously, “Western kabuki,†“German Expressionist,†and “Nouveau shamanic†(he’s cited both James Cagney and Bruce Lee as models). He invokes earlier eras of cinema, domestic and international, as much as theater, dance, mime, puppetry, poetry, and music. Cage has often been compared to a jazz musician for the way that his performances improvise on the melody of the main story, and also because one of his artistic heroes is Miles Davis. Way back in 1986, Cage told Dick Cavett that he broke his own self-imposed rule on not doing TV talk shows because he’d been offered a guest spot the same night as Davis, and he brought a new trumpet with him in hopes that Davis would “bless it†or “break it in.†(Davis did neither, but he did ask Cage backstage how he could do a 1950s period film with Dennis Hopper, Rumble Fish, and not come away understanding he’d look better in a leather jacket than a suit and tie.)
Cage and Perkins are drawing on a lot of horror, fantasy, and crime tropes in Longlegs. They’re also making an unstable piece of art that might’ve blown up in their faces if the results hadn’t been presented with controlled, tactical vagueness. Perkins, for his part, is creating a Freudian cocktail from autobiographical elements. His father was Anthony Perkins, a closeted actor who died of complications from AIDS in 1992 and was best known for playing the title character in Psycho, a motel manager who takes orders from a psychological construct of the mother he murdered for her sexual appetites, and who still haunts him. Perkins’s mother was model, actress, and photographer Berry Berenson, who died on 9/11 while traveling in one of the hijacked planes that crashed into the World Trade Center a day before what would have been the anniversary of her husband’s death. (A recurring date, July 14, figures prominently in the plot of Longlegs, as does the day before.)
“The early 1990s was extremely formative for me — passing from childhood into something like a stilted adulthood,†Perkins told critic Donald Clarke in an interview for The Irish Times. “My father died in 1992. That was a strange time as you can imagine. Silence of the Lambs hit us. I was turning 18. All of those things were a perfect storm of that stuff.†The ’90s setting of Longlegs, as well as some of the performance and directing choices, channel The Silence of the Lambs (problematic for its politics — the murderer was a man with a “gender identity problem†who wanted to wear women’s skins) and the so-called Satanic Panic of the ’80s and ’90s. There are also references in Longlegs to Dante’s Inferno, the Book of Revelation, and Lou Reed’s Transformer.
Cage’s performance as Longlegs is “shaded with the faintest elements of filmic trans feminine grotesquerie, and the modern viewer may understand this on a subconscious level,†writes Willow Catelyn Maclay, co-author (with Caden Mark Gardner) of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, adding that Cage’s performance “crackles with the risk of failure. In his wailing, pained psychosis, he approaches the danger of comedy.†Cage’s inspirations included Giulietta Masina’s performance in Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and an early childhood memory of his mother, Joy Vogelsang, putting cold cream on her face. “For no reason, she turned her face really fast and stared at me after [putting on] the cold cream,†he said. “The whiteness of the cold cream just really spooked me.†At the same time, though, Cage said he hoped Longlegs the character would be perceived as “very beautiful.â€
What makes Cage so special is that he always seems to be striving (with or without the participation of directors) to find the most surprising and intriguing way to play a character, no matter what sort of project he’s doing. But whenever anybody asks Cage about his acclaim, he tends to pivot to humility. (In a GQ video feature, an online forum posed the question, “What movie role would be improved by casting Nicolas Cage?†and Cage replied that it “would be arrogant for me to determine what I would have been better at than somebody else.â€) But during a recent conversation with New Yorker writer Susan Orlean (author of the article that became the movie Adaptation, in which Cage was Oscar-nominated for playing a nebbish screenwriter and his shamelessly sleazy brother), Cage seemed to acknowledge that his wide-ranging sense about what constitutes good acting might have given other actors (and filmmakers) permission to take more chances. “I don’t know if it’s new, per se, or a kind of recycling or return to an older style where people are less afraid to express themselves in a larger format,†he said. “They’re breaking free from ‘If it’s quiet and minimal, it’s great.’ They can liberate themselves and use their voices and gestures and go bigger.â€
The result has garnered an altogether more positive sort of attention than Cage was getting back in 2006, when he starred in the remake of The Wicker Man, which spawned the “Not the bees!†GIF. Cage hated that, and he subsequently said that he and LaBute intended for the film to be funny. The question “Should I be laughing at this?†is a key component of many modes of popular art. Cage has spent his career prompting it. Audiences might not have been able to savor a performance like Cage’s in Longlegs if he hadn’t been out there doing interviews for decades, pushing against the hegemony of “realism†and reassuring audiences that if he’s in a movie, not only can you expect the unexpected, you might even like it.