Great article. I apologize if I have already posted this, can't find it anywhere.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/movies/15darg.html?ref=movies

Madness or Method? Tough to Tell

Lucius Baston, left, and Nicolas Cage

THERE are any number of characteristic Nicolas Cage scenes in Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” interludes you watch with a now-familiar mixture of genuine appreciation and more than a touch of bewilderment. In one Mr. Cage, as the drug-addled cop of the film’s title, enters a room to join a stakeout. The cops are watching a house. And, crammed in the foreground of the shot, two iguanas are watching Mr. Herzog’s low-lying camera, their bodies stretched across the image.

Mr. Herzog’s film is very loosely based on a 1992 movie simply called “Bad Lieutenant,” directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Harvey Keitel. The two films share themes — both title characters are plagued by torments mostly of their own creation — yet are distinct in sordid story, detail, tone and milieu. Their most striking similarity is that each stars an actor whose performance is so intensely played and thoroughly inhabited, it can feel like psychosis, possession, a bit of both. They’re performances that make you wonder where the character leaves off and the man playing him has taken hold, a slippage that can lead to greatness, but also to moments of such excess and even grotesque comedy that they leave you squirming.

Mr. Cage revels in that slippage, though it was only after seeing “Bad Lieutenant” that I was reminded of how freaky he can be — and how exhilarating it can be to watch an actor go far and then just a little too far. Seduced by Mr. Herzog’s baroque narrative style and the perfect synchronicity of a star going for broke, I began to look at Mr. Cage anew. The dreariness of so many of his recent movies had, I realized, began to shape my responses. Instead of watching him, I had taken to watching an idea of him, one formed by decades of multiplex love and betrayal. At other times I didn’t watch him at all, skipping right over industrial products like “National Treasure” (2004).

There have been enough weird and wrong turns in his career that it was easy to develop a sense of his talent and its limits early on. In part that’s because right from the start — he played a lovelorn punk in “Valley Girl” (1983), his breakout role — there have been swathes, even entire films where his grandiose gestures and weird vocalizations have gotten the better of him. On occasion the results have seemed transparently terrible, as in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), in which Mr. Cage, whose uncle made the “Godfather” movies, employs a hopeless Italian accent. Yet even enervated kitsch like “Captain Corelli” is (almost) forgivable because with some actors who risk absurdity the highs can be as exhilarating as the lows. You chance the sludge for genius.

With most actors such computation is largely unnecessary: they navigate the space between professionally serviceable and exceptionally adequate, rarely reaching into the beyond. What makes Mr. Cage such an unusual screen presence and an even more atypical movie star is that he’s habitually very good and very bad from movie to movie, and sometimes scene to scene in a single film. Unlike most movie stars, whose stardom is partly predicated on a recognizable, coherent, stable persona and the ability to deliver a similarly coherent, stable performance — George Clooney almost always delivers a George Clooney-worthy turn, no matter how goofy the mustache — Mr. Cage is reliably unreliable.

For the initial stretch of his career the extravagances of his performances could have been explained as the jitters of inexperience or, less charitably, as evidence that an irrepressible showboat had already set sail. In “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986), a time-traveling romance from Francis Ford Coppola starring Kathleen Turner as a middle-aged woman who magically (or imaginarily) returns to high school, Mr. Cage plays both the title character’s estranged husband and his 1960 teenage self. Wearing a swoop of blond hair, his lanky limbs pinwheeling, he magnifies an already voluble presence with an adenoidal whine that might have easily undercut his character’s oft-stated attractiveness if Mr. Cage weren’t also such fun to watch. When he is on screen, everyone else fades away.

This insistent watchable quality — perhaps the most critical prerequisite of stardom, and certainly more essential to its brightness than either acting talent or even physical beauty — was there from the beginning. Journalists soon learned that Mr. Cage was also a colorful off-camera character, making much of his immersive preparations. A chronicle of his early years invariably includes the story about how he had some of his teeth pulled, apparently without anesthetic, to grasp the pain of a Vietnam vet for his role in “Birdy” (1984), along with a reference to the very live, very wiggly water bug he swallowed on camera for “Vampire’s Kiss” (1989). After a while these early excesses began to cling to him, even define him, making it difficult to separate the man, the method and the madness.

There were other romantic roles, some more convincing than others, including “Leaving Las Vegas,” the 1995 drama for which he won the Academy Award for best actor as a Hollywood dropout who drinks himself to death. Like every romance of doom, that Mike Figgis film courts the ridiculous, notably in its conceit of the beautiful whore (Elisabeth Shue) who, with tender tears and firm flesh, accompanies Mr. Cage’s character on his downward spiral. But he remains a mesmerizing presence as a man willfully hurtling toward his own demise. Near the end, when he staggers across a room clutching a bottle, his body violently shuddering, you no longer see the actor but a man so far gone that his face has become a death mask.

“Leaving Las Vegas” gave Mr. Cage generous room to explore behavior without apparent limits, to laugh and howl and giggle and exhale a (still) shocking final breath. It’s the kind of floridly embellished turn that actors like to reward because nothing makes them happier during awards season than watching one of their own in a spectacle of suffering. Although Mr. Cage’s performance was widely celebrated — he also won hearts and tchotckes at the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association — such flamboyance tests critical patience. That’s particularly true if the performance is thought to draw too much attention to itself (moderation in all things, chides the American critic!) or appears to lack the requisite realism, however that is defined at the time.

But Mr. Cage doesn’t do realism or, rather, he doesn’t do it all that persuasively. Like Al Pacino he is a maximalist and more apt to turn the volume up than down. (Mr. Pacino can, of course, brood silently if never altogether quietly.) Mr. Cage’s ability to go loud, louder, loudest and big, bigger, biggest, helps explain his successful metamorphosis into an action star. This transformation from the kind of actor who earns critical notice for the likes of David Lynch (“Wild at Heart,” 1990) while paying his bills with a “Top Gun” knockoff (“Fire Birds,” also 1990) occurred when after picking up his Oscar, he soon showed up in “The Rock,” the first of six (and counting) movies he has made for the über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Directed by Michael Bay with the usual orange fireballs and spatiotemporal confusion, “The Rock” didn’t put Mr. Cage into the same box-office company as Tom Cruise. But for the first time Mr. Cage, playing a biochemist “who’s never seen combat” (as the trailer puts it) though soon heroically locks and loads, was showing real action muscle in a Top 10 box-office title. In Mr. Cage, Mr. Bruckheimer, who has a longstanding habit of mixing real actors in with the pyrotechnics, found a star who could ride out the most outlandish plot developments with a fully committed performance that was amusing (comedy helps the carnage go down more easily), yet never so self-amused it might alienate the audience.

Over the past decade additional blockbuster success in “Con Air,” “Gone in 60 Seconds” and both “National Treasure” movies have also turned Mr. Cage into one of the most dependable stars for both Mr. Bruckheimer and for Disney, where the actor has moved between R-rated and PG roles. He has become an identifiable brand for Disney, going so far as to voice a goggle-wearing, evil-battling mole in the recent live-action family movie “G-Force,” also produced by Mr. Bruckheimer. It’s the kind of junk at which critics despair but, with more than $200 million in global box office, won’t be disappearing from Mr. Cage’s résumé soon. (That seems especially true now given that in October he sued his former business manager for sending him “down a path toward financial ruin.”)

In recent years Mr. Cage’s lack of discrimination (or taste) has threatened to overshadow the sweep of his career, which is understandable if you’ve seen him in the laughable remake of “The Wicker Man” (2006), about a cop battling honey-growing female pagans, including while wearing a bear costume. Yet after “Bad Lieutenant” I have begun to wonder if the narrative that many of us have grafted onto his career — the early if erratic promise, the mature successes, the dire midlife choices — does him an injustice. The truth is that he gets the job done in entertainments like “National Treasure” and “Knowing” (2009), which assumedly give him the financial freedom to cut loose with a director like Mr. Herzog. And the highlights from “The Wicker Man” (available on YouTube) do have their demented pleasures.

Mr. Clooney, again by point of unfair comparison, has rarely if ever delivered a performance as profoundly out of sync with the presumptive goals of a movie as Mr. Cage’s turn in “The Wicker Man.” But neither does Mr. Clooney send shivers up your spine, either in delight or dismay. Mr. Cage is the more unpredictable actor and consequently the more dangerous one. He has made a habit of failure and frequently pimped out his talent. And yet, as “Bad Lieutenant” shows, he remains the same Nicolas Cage of his early, later and most critically lauded career: the man of a thousand facial tics, a student of all accents and a master of none, a star who, for better, worse and sometimes both, gives us reason after reason to go the movies.