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Lord of War September 19, 2005 |
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Nicholas Cage is an actor you can trust. His roles aren’t always Oscar winners, and they aren’t always chosen in the better interest of the viewing public, but no matter how good or bad the outcome, a Cage performance is always worth the admission. Plunk down your money, and trust that you’ll get the goods from Nicholas Cage. Trust goes hand in hand with believability, you believe Cage as a pathetic dying drunk in “Leaving Las Vegas”, you believe Cage as a neurotic confidence man in “Matchstick Men”, you believe Cage, believe it or not, as a man with a total facial transplant in “Face/Off”, and now, in his new movie, “Lord of War”, you believe Cage as the world’s number one gun dealer, a headstrong character as slick as the confidence man, as cocky as the face guy, and as semi-moralistic and bombastic as the wasted drunk. It’s a testament to the actor that no matter how similar one performance is to the other, or how different one movie is from the next, his central figure locks the audience in for the ride, and even in the craziest of circumstances (face transplant anyone?), Cage can pull off miracles. In “Lord of War”, a film as visually dazzling and beautifully written as it is self-important and confused, Cage not only makes us sympathize with a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, invariably of course, but he makes us laugh while doing it, creating a character so likeable in a field so crummy and hedonistic, that pausing to accept the film’s huge themes and messages is made much easier by the fact that pausing to accept Cage’s strong performance is non-existent, it was a given from the very start. “You don’t have to worry,” he says right off the bat in narration, “I’m not going to lie to make myself look good.” One of the film’s moral issues is if the character is good or evil, and it’s up for grabs, but there’s no denying that Cage makes it a tough decision, playing both sides of the field with levity and emotion. Cage plays Russian-American immigrant Yuri Orlov who, in the early ‘70’s while living in Brooklyn as a Jew, witnesses a mob execution at a local bar and is transfixed by the power of the gun. Soon he is buying an AK-47 for himself, studying it, and nervously selling it for a handsome profit in a dingy hour-only motel. “Selling your first gun is like having sex for the first time,” he narrates, “you have no idea what to do, but it’s exciting, and one way or another, it’s over way too fast.” In a matter of a few montages and a stop off at the 1983 Berlin Arms Fair to introduce Yuri’s chief rival, Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm), Yuri is suddenly a world class gun runner, dealing massive amounts of weaponry, partially funded by the U.S. government, to various warring factions overseas (“I was an equal opportunity Merchant of Death”), with the help of his younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto), who obtains a debilitating drug problem when one ruthless war lord pays the brothers in un-cut cocaine, an exchange worth triple the price of boring old dollar bills. The plot is furious and makes its way from the ‘70’s to the present in quick succession, dealing in parts with the end of the Cold War and the huge stockpiles of weapons left in Soviet states no longer controlled by Moscow (“The ones who know don’t care,” he says, “and the ones who care don’t know.”), with Yuri’s dealings with a brutal African dictator, Baptiste (Eamonn Walker of “Oz”), when the Cold War angle cools off, his wooing of and eventual marriage to a beautiful model (Bridget Moynahan), and the attempts by a U.S. Interpol officer (Ethan Hawke) to finally bring down the elusive Yuri and his carefully hidden evidence. In a way, the plot gets bogged down in melodramatics too often, like when Yuri becomes depressed and addicted to coke after Baptiste involves him in a ruthless murder, or when his wife discovers his real profession and gives a speech about “failing as a human”, but Yuri is a fascinating character, and it isn’t often that you see a mainstream film revel so much in gunplay but still level it off with ethics and satire. Some will complain that the film is glorifying gun violence, and that it only gets moralistic when the coolness of Yuri’s profession rapidly deteriorates, which is in itself part of the ethical dilemma of Danger vs. Rush (Yuri’s sex analogy works best), and taken in the right context, that argument is correct, “Lord of War” does make gun running out to be an exciting, lucrative profession, filled with beautiful women (courtesy of happy dictators) and endless money, but like Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”, which this film is obviously modeled on, it takes a macho, thrilling subject and tries hard to dispel the guilty pleasure aspect of watching a man fuel genocidal war. Hawke’s agent gives a few heady speeches about the dirtiness of Yuri’s work, and Leto, who has played drugged out loners in the past (see “Requiem For a Dream”), becomes the voice of reason when his big brother gets involved in a dangerous African deal, a climax that would have worked wonderfully had the film stopped there, instead of going on another twenty minutes, with a coda about Big Government and gun trading that’s obvious and unnecessary, if not unsettling and true. Writer, director Andrew Niccol has a great visual eye, opening his movie with a mesmerizing day-in-the-life sequence of a bullet, from it’s inception to it’s eventual grizzly destination (played to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”, the sequence is a highlight of a film with many impressive visual tricks), and his screenplay, while overreaching, is chock filled with choice narration, which Cage breezes through with all the intensity of a door-to-door bible salesman, you know, the intense kind, not the lazy kind. If the politics are muddled, it’s at the expense of characterization, and “Lord of War” has one larger than life character in Yuri Orlov, and a great professional in Nicholas Cage. “Lord of War” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf |