This time around, Josh brought us a movie that definitely intrigued me when I saw the trailer, but that I never got a chance to catch in the theater. That movie was 2021’s Pig, directed by Michael Sarnoski.
Pig is a film that starts in the grimy, wilderness world of the truffle hunter and then moves into the seedy underbelly of the Portland dining scene, which is a journey that few if any would have ever considered, and it does it through the search for a pignapped truffle pig.
Rustic Mushroom Tart
The film very conveniently puts out title cards for its three acts, each subtitled with the food featured within.
Wasn’t this used as the cover for a CSN album?
For instance, the rustic mushroom tart was prepared, with painstaking care and impeccable cooking talent, on a stove in a rundown shack deep in the woods, and apparently, it would seem, for the primary benefit of a pig.
This is a very unlikely turn of events, and it’s worth trying to figure out just how Robin Feld (Nicolas Cage) got there in the first place. The pig, of course, is a truffle pig, and Feld scratches out an existence as a truffle hunter in the wilderness outside of Portland, trading his harvest to an entrepreneur truffle distributor in exchange for groceries and solace.
Why does he want solace? Well, we get a hint that something horrible has happened to the love of his life via his reluctance to fully listen to an audiotape that she has recorded for him. And why is he such a dedicated cook for a dude living in a cabin in the middle of the forest? If you guessed that he was a chef in a former life, well, you aren’t braindead.
Do you mind not bleeding on the leather?
But this…idyllic?…existence is not to last, as a couple of methed-out forest dwellers break into the cabin at night, stealing the pig and giving Rob a pretty nice whack on the head. Rob manages to make his way to the nearest semblance of civilization, and calls up his truffle distributor Amir to help him in a quest to recover his pig. Amir doesn’t particularly think this is his problem, but is quickly reminded that it’s Rob’s truffles that are paying for his Camaro, so he ends up joining the search, which after a couple of quick stops in Truffle Camp and Meth Camp takes a turn into Portland and the underground dining scene.
Mom’s French Toast and Deconstructed Scallops
The search starts out looking like it will be fruitless, as the Portland Gourmand Mafia are quite powerful, and they don’t really see Rustic Rob as part of their club anymore.
The First Rule of Getting The Shit Kicked Out Of You By Bitter Ex-Employees Club is
But Rob DOES know of the existence of a related club – a fight club as it were – where he can sacrifice what remains of his face to turn a nice profit for the organizers and get a pig clue in exchange. Of course, to do this, he has to reveal who he really is – a secret that Amir had not been in on.
But before cashing in on the clue, Rob needs to sleep off the brain damage at Amir’s apartment. Amir makes him his mother’s french toast (he failed to use stale bread) and we get some good exposition. Amir’s dad is a big deal in the Portland restaurant scene, but there’s some clear tension there and Amir is trying to make it on his own with his truffle business (while to some extent stepping on his father’s toes – but it appears Dad does more than just hawk truffles). Amir claims his mother is a suicide (though we later learn that she remains alive in a coma, and his Dad refuses to pull the plug on the hopeless situation), and informs Robin Feld that he knows who he is – he remembers that when he was young his parents went to a hot new restaurant in town and were as happy when they had come home as he had ever seen them (or would ever see them again), raving about the food and the wine. And that restaurant was Robin Feld’s.
It was nice of you to loosen the dress code for me
But now – the clue! It leads Rob and Amir to Eurydice, a fru-fru yuppie joint that sells deconstructed scallops infused with the smoke from Douglas Fir cones…under glass…it’s enough to make you cringe. But the chef – who as all fru-fru yuppie chefs in Portland is going to be adding a truffle dish for the winter menu – apparently knows something about the affair of the pig. Remember the pig? This is a movie about a pig. (By the way, Rob at some late point – probably after here – admits that he doesn’t even need the pig to find the truffles. He can tell where they are by the trees. He just wants the pig back because he loves her, that’s all.)
The chef also happens to have been a short-lived employee of Feld’s, who fired him because he kept overcooking the pasta. Feld apparently has a remarkable memory, because he remembers just about everything about this chef, including his dream of opening an English Pub. This is decidedly not an English Pub. Anyway, in light of the chef’s reluctance to speak about the pig, and in exchange for the deconstructed scallops, Feld deftly deconstructs the pitiful life of this chef until he is beaten into submission, and gives him the info he needs. Who stole the pig? Why, it was his own truffle source…Amir’s dad.
Awkward!
A Bird, a Bottle, & a Salted Baguette
As you might imagine, Robin realizes that Amir must have spilled the beans about his supplier to his father, and he’s pissed (even though there’s no particular reason to believe that Amir was sworn to silence, nor that the existence of his supplier would lead his dad to sabotage the supply).
Somewhere behind this chiaroscuro lies Adam Arkin.
At any rate, Rob wants nothing to do with Amir at this point, and instead of bumming a ride decides to steal a bicycle to make his way to Dad’s house. Dad, as an underground restaurant kingpin is needless to say kind of a dick, and he refuses to give Rob any information about the pig. But Rob got what he needed, and when he finds Amir sitting outside the house in the Camaro, he enlists him on a scavenger hunt.
And here comes the bird, and the wine, and the salted baguette. With Amir’s help, Robin returns to Dad’s house to cook him dinner. And not just any dinner, but the exact dinner that he had on that last happy night with his wife so long ago. Dad, well, he remembers. And it breaks him.
He admits to Robin that the pig is dead – it was artlessly and brutally handled by the methheads who stole it, and it couldn’t be saved.
Rob takes this kind of rough, but he eventually makes his way back to the sticks, and he finally plays the audiotape – a recording of his dead wife covering Bruce Springsteen’s I’m On Fire for him on acoustic guitar, which plays through the credits. The End.
So, I gotta say, Pig was a really great movie. Really great. Cage is excellent throughout, the pacing is perfect, the story reveals basically everything that needs to be revealed in good time (e.g. Amir’s parents’ dinner, Feld’s remarkable memory…) and doesn’t burden itself with those things that don’t need to be explained (e.g. what happened to Feld’s wife). The only issue that I have (and this seems to be universal among the people I’ve spoken to about it) was the Fight Club. It just didn’t make any sense. If we needed Feld to be (even more) beaten up so he could bleed over the rest of the film I feel like there are more realistic ways to have gotten that done. Not that there ISN’T an underground restaurant fight club in Portland (how would I know?), but in a movie whose plot is driven by the fru-fru restarurant truffle economy (not something I suspect doesn’t exist, but at least something that feels largely fictionalized) maybe keeping the other foot pretty grounded isn’t a bad idea. Oh well.
But aside from that one misstep, Pig knows exactly what it is about. It’s a movie about what’s important to you, and what you do about it when the important things are taken away. When Robin loses his wife, he becomes a hermit. He’s stuck on grief. When Dad basically loses his wife, he refuses to let her go. He’s stuck at bargaining. But when Robin loses his pig, he goes after her – anger and finally acceptance. He muses once it is all over that maybe it would have been better if he never went looking for her, because then she would still be alive in his head. He worries that he did the wrong thing. But Amir shoots him down – she wouldn’t have actually been alive, no matter what Rob did. As one with experience owning pets, I can tell you that not looking is that last thing one could accept doing. And ultimately, for all the pain it causes him, the loss of the pig appears to push Robin towards coming to accept his wife’s death – the broken, hopeless, self-hermited man who set out to rescue his pig returns as a man who we hope is on his way to recovery.
So yeah, it’s a great movie about a man who loved a pig (and his name wasn’t Giuseppe!)
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 