 | MOVIE #1,423 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.07.24 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 57. I saw this one around the time it came out and remember liking it. This Christmas flick was a fairly big hit, doubling its $60-million budget. It was Brett Ratner’s follow-up to the smash Rush Hour. Ratner of course would go onto to get #MeToo’d HARD, and he’s since not made or produced a film since the late 2010s. (He actually emigrated to Israel like a true psycho last year, and this is the only Ratner collab in the Cage filmography so I don’t think we need to say more.) |
We move thirteen years forward to the present day and see Cage is a high-power businessman and aging playboy (and excellent lover) in NYC, the Big Apple baby. It's Christmas Eve. This is a Christmas movie, as noted earlier. His company is on the verge of a massive merger deal. He's keeping his coworkers late but not too late. He's an asshole but not nearly a Bill Murray Scrooged-level asshole boss. He gets a message from his old flame Téa. He's curious and suspicious. He leaves the office late, walking home through a gentle snow.
He stops in for some eggnog and Don Cheadle pulls a gun on Junior's mental hospital friend from The Sopranos playing the cashier (Ken Leung) when he won't cash his lotto ticket. So Cage buys the ticket to defuse the situation…
Outside the store, the two have a cryptic conversation and Cage goes home alone to his swanky apartment. But when he wakes up, he's in New Jersey, for he has become… “The Family Man”! Confused, he takes the minivan back to NYC and we see some Twin Towers green screen action…
Of course, the doorman and a neighbor at his building don't know who he is. Cage is locked in here…
They don't know who he is at his job either. And it's there he sees a different name listed as company president. Right on cue, Cheadle shows up driving his Ferrari and says he'll explain everything. He speeds around the city but is still super vague about the situation…
Cage is playing it up here (no shit), but he's really committed. There's a vulnerability to his performance that I really appreciate here.
Looking for his house, he runs into his friend Jeremy Piven and Piven walks him home like he's a lost dog. His wife Téa is rightfully pissed and Cage futilely tries to explain what's happening…
Cage's body language is so good. That little step back when his daughter gets close to him? So good.
Later, they go out to an adults-only Xmas party and the host is immediately flirty with him. This movie gets a lot of little things wrong about New Jersey, in my opinion. And feel free to skip past these extremely minor grievances from a lifelong resident of the Garden State:
• They call the Star Ledger newspaper, the "Newark Star Ledger." Nobody does that.
• When Cage mentions “the city”, his wife asks, “New York City?” Nobody would do that. They would know what “city” he’s referring to lol.
• There are hardcore adult Nets fans in the year 2000. These people would be Knicks fans, most likely.
• Also, in general, these New Jerseyans are too negative on NJ. We are a self-deprecating people, sure, but we're also too prideful to so casually slag on our home state. OK, this was a dumb rant. Sorry. Back to the review…
Cage finds out that his wife is a pro-bono lawyer and he's not happy about that. They leave the party and Cage has to walk the dog he just learns that he has.
The next morning he has to change his infant son's dirty diaper and his daughter says, “you're not really my dad, are you?” This little kid thinks it's aliens …
It's a bit hokey, but I'm buying it. He finds out from his daughter that he's a tire salesman at his father-in-law’s establishment, Big Ed's. At his office he slowly pieces together that he never went to London in 1987 after all. For such a smart dude, he's pretty slow to the punch. But I guess this is a pretty weird fantasy scenario so let's forgive him.
Cage and Téa are about to bone because it's their night to bone, but he falls asleep while she changes into a sexy outfit.
The next day, Cage and Téa get into it at the shopping mall…
This film definitely asks a lot in the suspending disbelief department, but by far the most glaring is his wife's casual acceptance of Cage's instant insanity within this reality. The movie can only move in one direction, though, so it's simply something that we have to accept.
Cage is an ace member of the bowling team but of course this version of Cage is obviously not a bowler so comedy ensues on the lanes. While at the alley, he also figures out that the flirty lady who threw the Xmas party wants to have an affair with him. Jeremy Piven tells him not to do it and we never revisit this subplot again.
Later that night, Cage watches a home movie of him serenading his wife at a birthday party. It's corny yet charming...
The next morning, Cage forgets his wedding anniversary. A big husband no-no. To make up for it, he takes her out to a fancy dinner in the ole Big Apple. At the restaurant, he confesses. Sort of…
In another plot stretch, Cage meets his former boss at the tire shop and charms his way into a job at the company he led in his other life. He has some big dramatic conversations about it with Téa. Then Donny C shows up and tells him that it's time to go back and this was only a glimpse. He’s sad about it and it feels genuine. He wakes up the next morning and he's back in NYC on Christmas Day. He drives to find his family in NJ but Robert Downey Sr. lives there instead…
Weird cameo!
He goes back to work to put out a massive fire concerning the big merger deal and bemoans the fact that this life is not really so fulfilling.
In a limo he looks up the address for Téa and goes over to an apartment where he finds her in the process of moving to Paris. She's also a focused and successful careerist in this reality, but she — like the Cage of a few days ago — is in denial about this empty existence. She had called Cage the other day simply to give him back a box of his old stuff that she'd kept for all these years. She's clearly not interested in going down memory road, though, telling Cage to look her up if he's ever in Paris, though it seems like an airless platitude. But Cage can't give up on her so he goes to the airport and in a callback to the opening of the film, he makes a big scene when it looks like the happy ending is gonna pan out…
You'd think she'd be calling the cops after that insane rant but instead she agrees to miss her flight and have a cup of coffee with our boy. And the credits roll as they sit sipping java in the airport terminal as snow falls outside.
This is actually one of my most favorite Cage performances yet because it's a perfect example of him elevating the material. This would probably be a throwaway slog in the hands of anyone else (although the film, co-written by the dynamic screenwriting duo gave us 2009’s Old Dogs, is actually sweet and well-intentioned). But he makes the entirety of the over 2-hour run-time worth it. Sure, the story — kind of an inverted It's a Wonder Life — is really slight and they don't really seem to give a shit about the framing device or even attempting to explain it at all. On some level, I admire this because what difference would it have made if we knew Cheadle was an angel or whatever. Perhaps, my enjoyment was party due to some sense of nostalgia, as well, but I would compare this favorably to City of Angels, which I liked more but has a similar kind of goofy, romantic plot that still manages to work for what it is.
THE VERDICT: 7 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,422 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,424 ⫸
⫷ MOVIE #1,422 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,424 ⫸
The Family Man is a 2000 American romantic fantasy comedy-drama film directed by Brett Ratner, from a screenplay by David Diamond and David Weissman. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Téa Leoni, with Don Cheadle, Saul Rubinek, and Jeremy Piven in supporting roles. It was released on December 22, 2000.
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