"I saw a guy, Dix, who they also said would be fine and he had a face like a medium-rare cheesburger."

September 22nd, 2012
Birdy, (1984)

Nicolas Cage is Al Columbato

I'm about a month into my Nicolas Cage diary and this is my first sticking point: how do I approach a movie like Birdy?

I have to organize my thoughts. First, this is the first appearance of Nicolas Cage as we know him. Cage's performance here is not good by any standard definition but it's not really bad either. Interesting would I guess be a kind word for it. And isn't that kind of the story of his career?

Cage is supposed to a blue collar, puffed-out everydude who's best friends forever with an introverted spacecase played by Matthew Modine. Not only do Cage and Modine have no real chemistry as friends, Cage out-crazies Modine in scene after scene with his manic charisma. By the end of the film when Cage is on the floor of a hospital with his face bandaged and his legs splayed as he cradles Modine and shouts to the heavens Nicolas Cage the Dramatic Actor has been born and our lives would never be the same.

When Cage was pilloried for his bizarre performance in Peggy Sue Got Married (entry coming soon!) he responded by saying: "I was reading books about Edvard Munch, about how people were lambasted for their art. I welcomed the idea of bad reviews because that would mean I was doing something that challenged the critics. I thought I could change acting..."

I have a theory that the reason Cage is so infamous is because he sits somewhere between the chameleon actors who disappear into their roles and stars who coast on their cult of personality. For example, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a serious actor but Bruce Willis never plays anything but Bruce Willis. Cage could never play the roles Hoffman plays because he constantly draws focus to himself - he has the magnetic charisma of a capital M Movie Star - but after he's drawn that focus he uses the characters he's supposed to play to riff on whatever whim seems to come to him. When Bruce Willis draws focus he's still just Bruce Willis, probably playing a cop or something.

But how do we evaluate a Nic Cage performance, then? Why, for instance, in Birdy, when Modine tells him that he dreamed of flying last night does Cage reply in a squeaky cartoon voice: "You flew? How you flew?" Does Cage even care about the actors he shares his scenes with, the directors he works with, the studios who pay him or the pictures he's acting in? His number one consideration from moment to moment seems to be himself and whatever hare he is currently stalking through the woodland of his fancy. It's fair to call Cage an egoist, an actor who selfishly sacrifices acting conventions to own whims, but I think it's also fair to call him an artist. There's seemingly a degree of thought, however bizarre or misguided it might be, to all of his dramatic decisions and their outcomes are, failing all else, consistently interesting. 

I wrote above that Nicolas Cage's performance in Birdy isn't really good or bad. It was "interesting". "Distracting" would also be an accurate descriptor. Birdy is a movie that could really use more grounding in reality for the highwire balancing act it attempts between wartime drama of lost youth and surrealist comedy. Needless to say, casting a weirdo like Cage as the friend who is tasked with helping restore Modine's sanity is not helpful.

Birdy splits itself flashing back and forth between Modine and Cage's childhood in the slums of Philadelphia and their present as traumatized Vietnam vets. Modine plays the titular character, a loner who spends his time wishing he was a bird and, after returning from war, seemingly believing he is a bird. Cage is the boy-next-door who becomes unlikely friends with Modine only to come back from Vietnam with half a face and unspecified demons of his own. 

I had seen pictures of Cage and Modine in homemade bodysuits of pigeon feathers prior to viewing Birdy and I assumed the movie reached some sort of silly climax involving these. Little did I expect that, after Cage and Modine meet, it only takes one montage before they're scaling a factory's scaffolding to catch pigeons, looking like the extras in the saddest production of The Lion King. When Modine slips and "flys" into a sandpit below Cage is at his side crying, embracing him, stroking his face. I looked at the clock. This was, like, fifteen minutes into the running time of the the movie. Birdy had thrown down its gauntlet. "David," it said, "Shit's about to get weird."

And weird shit got. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by William Wharton, Birdy is directed by Alan Parker of Angel Heart and Pink Floyd: The Wall, a director whose greatest strengths lie in the figurative. Birdy's dream sequences are powerful and haunting. In one, Parker uses a skycam to simulate flying to exhilarating effect. In another, Birdy has a nocturnal emission imagining the shadow of a trapped bird flapping its wings, projected large against the side of a moonlit tenement house. 

If those moments feel like Buñuel, other scenes feel lifted from a Todd Solondz movie. In particular a sequence where Birdy goes to prom, talks with his father, the school's janitor, who is busy wringing out a mop soaked with other students' vomit by hand. This followed by a poignant, crushing scene where Birdy turns down his date's awkward sexual advances only to spend the night naked, making tender love (of a sort) with a canary. Or what about when Al (Nic Cage) and Birdy pick up a pair of girls on the boardwalk after which Al fucks his girl under said boardwalk as Birdy and his date watch?

Birdy is a curiosity in the truck stop taxidermy sense. As in, I'm not sure what you were attempting by grafting that duck to that monkey and I'm not sure if you succeeded but I sure appreciate that you did it. Likewise I'm not sure what Parker was attempting by grafting this Frankensteinian movie together. As Birdy wobbled from tone to tone towards a brilliant climax that undercuts its growing histrionics with a single punchline I wasn't even sure if I was enjoying it. But I appreciated it. Racing with the Moon made me nostalgic with its formulaic embrace of big-hearted cliches but Birdy left me unsettled, reevaluating my standards of bad and good. It was "interesting".