Pig is a beautiful, unique film; one that defies expectations. At first I thought it was a revenge trope, but in the end it killed with kindness.
One scene in particular hit like a hammer. In it, Nicolas Cage (Rob) sits with a Head Chef in his busy fine-dining restaurant, asking why he never followed his dream of opening a traditional English pub:
Rob: They’re not real. You get that, right? None of it is real. The critics aren’t real. The customers aren’t real. Because… this isn’t real.
Chef Finway: [laughing awkwardly] Okay…
Rob: Derek, why do you care about these people? They don’t care about you. None of them. They don’t even know you because you haven’t shown them. Every day, you’ll wake up, and there’ll be less of you. You live your life for them, and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself.
[long pause; Derek’s tight smile has slowly faded into a look of sorrow and regret]
Rob: We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.
This scene highlights how so many of us live our lives; pursuing promising opportunities that seem likely to succeed, at the expense of embracing our true callings, irrespective of the results.
The severe sorrow in losing his pig was only made more poignant by the grief the character felt for the loss of his previous partner. Perhaps one of the reasons I found the film so moving was due to my recent breakup and loving companionship of my own cat. In any case, the start saw me hooked and the end saw me crying.
Highly recommend this film – like a bone tingling wind chime, it struck a deep chord. Rather than the CGI superhero slop that dominates the box office, in my humble opinion, this is what good cinema is really about.