Mark Reviews Movies: PIG

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 15, 2021

We don't need to spend too much time with Rob (Nicolas Cage), the quiet and severe protagonist of Pig, to understand that he has experienced a great amount of pain. Every significant character in co-writer/director Michael Sarnoski's debut feature has had a similar experience, which becomes the wounded heart of this strange but compassionate film. Rob just makes that pain an inescapable, defining fact of his life.

There isn't much to know about this man. He lives alone in the woods, somewhere within a couple hours' drive of Portland, with only his truffle-sniffing pig to keep him company. The swine is good company, at least, and definitely enough for Rob, who speaks softly and kindly to the pig, as someone might talk to a loyal dog or an affectionate cat. He's capable of love, obviously, and a cassette tape, featuring the voice of a woman expressing her own love for the man, shows that his capacity for love hasn't always been limited to nature—the woods, the buried mushrooms, the pig, the absolute solitude.

The pig looks up expectantly at its human, patiently waiting for food. It sleeps on a mat right next to Rob's mattress. When there's work to be done, it follows Rob's orders, finds fairly sizeable truffles, and helps him scrape by the incredibly meager life he has been living. It's enough, and for Rob, that's all that matters.

There is a plot within Sarnoski and Vanessa Block's screenplay. In the case the laid-back and mysterious introduction to Rob and his hermit-like lifestyle isn't enough of a clue, though, that plot, its mechanics, and its significance to the real story the filmmakers are telling here aren't really important.

We meet Rob. We meet the pig. We see their connection as more than about work, when the pig seems to attempt to comfort Rob after he briefly listens to that tape with the woman's voice. We get a glimpse of a life that once was, when Rob puts together a fairly fancy meal for himself with a found truffle, and we quickly understand that rob probably does make a decent amount of money, selling his findings to Amir (Alex Wolff), a truffle seller from the city.

Then, a couple of masked people break into Rob's cabin in the middle of the night. He tries to fight them off, but they best him. As Rob lies on the floor, drifting into unconsciousness, the pig's screams fade into the distance, as the thieves carry it off into the night and to some unknown fate.

Rob wants his pig back. He enlists Amir, who knows the ins and outs of the truffle business in Portland as well as anyone, and finds himself returning to the scraps of a past life that he thought he had been able to escape.

This setup, of course, could go in a number of ways, with the most obvious one being that Rob, taking the pig abduction personally, would seek out revenge against the people who now have his swine. There would be a good laugh in that, but Sarnoski doesn't see any of this as a joke. That's a smart move on the filmmaker's part, because it allows this material to develop an air of unexpected longing and mourning, these characters to reveal some unexpected and subtle depth, and the whole of the film to be strange—not because of a gimmick, but because it's invested in a weird world, full of people trying to escape the very uncertainty, disappointment, and pain that comes with life.

Along the way, Sarnoski and Block show us this world—where locally harvested truffles are rare commodities, where members of the kitchen staffs at restaurants participate in an underground fight club of sorts, where Amir's top truffle-selling father Darius (Adam Arkin) holds almost complete sway over the comings and goings of this inner circle—and develop these characters as the search unfolds. The small details matter almost as much as the larger ones.

Take, for example, how Amir, who holds his father in a place of equal parts respect and fear, spends his time in the car listening to lectures about classical music. When we finally meet Amir's old man, Darius' study is filled with the sound of that music. The two haven't connected on anything else, but maybe, Amir seems to be hoping, music could be the little thing they finally have in common.

The bigger details are important, too. Rob is certain that all of Portland—all of its people and all of their lives, dreams, and miseries—is doomed to be submerged by an earthquake-generated tidal wave soon, so in the big picture, none of anything really matters. A scene with a chef (played by David Knell), who runs a successful and high-end restaurant, has Rob forcing the man to confront his failure to follow through on his real dream. If the big picture doesn't matter, there'd better be a little one that makes a person genuinely happy. Rob, whose past and pain are gradually revealed as the plot continues, knows that. By the end, he helps Amir and even the seemingly villainous Darius realize that, too.

Yes, this is a plot about a missing pig and its owner's single-minded mission to find said swine, but the story of Pig is about old wounds, lost loves, neglected passions, destructed and destructive relationships, and a general sense of feeling lost in a world in which time is fleeting and happiness is elusive. Rob wants that pig, not because it represents something or is his only friend or is the secret to his truffle-hunting and survival, but because it simply gives him some feeling of being content—as brief and small as those moments may be. It's enough, and "enough" is sometimes the best for which we can hope.

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