 we're live, the movie show here on a given Tuesday with George Cason, and we're really having a good one this time. It's called The Pig. George, you know, that was a real stroke that we should look at and review The Pig for this show. Why? Pig is very, the plot is very, very subtle, but very profound. And you have to sort of look behind the initial scenes and put the whole thing together to understand what the writer, the director, is trying to convey. And it's a, when I say profound, it's lessons for life, for every one of us. Because every time we do one of these shows, it plays into our own lives, all of our lives, right? Now, I don't know if you want me to get into the plot, but this has- No, well, no. But let's talk about the genre first, OK? And then we'll talk, we'll go into the plot and why it is so instructive to all of us. Here's a movie that's not violent. Although there are implications of violence, it never actually gets violent. And there's no particular romance involved. I don't think maybe you found it there. Sometimes if you look hard, you find romance wherever you go. And sometimes you find vengeance. I'm not sure sure I would call this vengeance. I would call it maybe bad memories, memories of all kinds in this thing. So it's different. This movie was different. It's like 99% of the movies are in one category. And this one, Pig, is in another category, kind of all by itself. And that's what's so remarkable about it. And just as you said, it's instructive. It's useful to the individual. You take away something from it, and that makes it different. It's not just the regular stuff. OK, let's talk about the plot, and then we'll talk about the takeaways. This has to do with a gentleman by the name of Rob or Robin. His name was Robin Feld. And he was famous. He was a famous chef. But you don't know that at first. You don't know that. You see him as a schlub living in the woods in a rundown shack. And you never have the slightest idea about his background. You see him as a schlub. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but. No, no, that's good because. One thing that I get out of this movie is that it reveals what happened only step by step. It spoon feeds you. You don't know what happened until you watch it for a while. And then you get, mm, there's an interesting fact. Mm, there's an interesting. It is telling you slowly in steps what the real message, what the real story is. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Similar to the father, which we reviewed a number of weeks ago, right? Where they give you little tidbits that I was going to get here in this big movie. As you said, they're giving you little clues from the beginning, but nothing really comes together until later in the movie. So that that's that's thing. So as you said, you see this guy, middle-aged guy living in the woods in a ramshack shack in the middle of nowhere, right? In the state of Oregon. The state of Oregon. My guess it was it was probably middle, right in the middle of Oregon, maybe on the west side of the mountains there, Cascade Mountains, maybe on the east side, but it was definitely in the woods. And it was remote. It was hours away from Portland, for example. He's out in the middle of nowhere. And he's there. And what he's doing for a living, he finds truffles, which is a delicacy. You know, in France, I know it's a big delicacy. So he's digging those up and he's got this pig that pigs are known to be able to smell the smell that the truffle in the roots of trees. So the pig helps him to find these truffles. And then he's got this buyer, Amir, who comes from Portland. Before you get to that, one of the tip-off points that I found was interesting. By the way, a truffle is kind of a mushroom, isn't it? It's a delicacy, mushroom. It's only available in high-end restaurants. It's popular in Europe and particularly in French cooking. It's expensive. The other thing is that it was so interesting and maybe mysterious when he goes out with the pig and he gets, this is in the early moments of the movie, and he gets the truffles and then he comes back to his shack and what does he do with them? He cooks them. He cooks them and you see his cooking style. You see the way his hands work and the pan and the way he cooks the truffles with the ingredients and so forth. And you say, this isn't really a bum. This isn't a remote, removed guy living in the middle of the woods. This guy has something special going on that he could cook and like and love truffles the way he demonstrates. Yes, definitely. Little clues that you picked up really early because you probably are a connoisseur in restaurants. I haven't been much in restaurants for like 40 years since I became a movie. One of the clues is he's got this battery operated recording machine or a player and he puts this cassette in there and for just a minute and a beautiful woman's beautiful voice comes on and then he stops it after just a second. So that's another clue that there's something going on. Okay, let me get into a little more then you can chime in if I'm jumping ahead or not. Okay, so he goes out in the woods and he finds the truffles with the pig, the little pig, you know. I thought the pig was very cute. Very cute. That was the cutest pig I've ever seen. It had kind of freckles on it. It was a brown and white pig. It was a small pig. It wasn't a big pig and it was friendly. You know, pigs can be good pets and this was a pet as well as a truffle pig and it was very friendly and warm and this was his buddy in life in the woods. Exactly. And pigs are known to be very friendly like porpoises. You know, they've done studies. I mean, unfortunately I don't eat pigs, you know but most people eat but they're supposed to be very gentle animals and people don't understand. They may be rolling the mud. So yeah, so this was his, this was like a companion to him and we'll get into that too about what it was. So then he's got this buyer, Amir, that comes with his fancy Camaro or whatever from Portland every Thursday and picks up those truffles and gives them the money so that he can live. You know, I mean, basically he needs basic supplies out in the woods. One interesting thing is that when you meet Amir, you don't like him. He's a hot shot. He's a wise guy. He's running too fast and he's a hustler is what he is. He's a truffle hustler is what he is. And you immediately, the way the movie sets up you don't like him but as in all good literature and all good movie the guy changes in the course of the movie. His character is dynamic. He goes from a guy who's really not likable who's a hustler to something else. We should talk about that too. Oh yes. And the thing is, you know the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I mean, we're gonna get into more his father Darius who is like a real hustler sort of mob related kind of guy in Portland, right? And that's part of the plot too of what happens. So Amir picks up that stuff, you know and takes it and then there is some violence Jay in this movie. So Rob, you know, the protagonist is sitting in his cabin and some thugs come in and beat the heck out of him. Beat him up and then he was sleeping and all of a sudden he gets up and he's all bloody, right? And his pig is gone. These hustlers came and stole his pig. They took his pig. You know, and at that point it seems that the pig was very central to finding the truffles, you know that's what we are led to believe at that point. Yeah, he's crushed. I remember that. And he's crushed and then only then you begin to realize how important the pig was. This was no ordinary truffle pig. This no ordinary companion. His life revolved around this pig. You don't realize it until the pig's gone. Exactly. And then we'll get into that a little later too of what the real reason was he wanted that pig back. So Amir comes and he convinces Amir that he can't supply him anymore with truffles without his pig. He needs his pig, right? And everybody believed, Amir believed that the pig was the central point of how to find the truffles. And we'll get into a little later of how Rob tells him later that the pig wasn't that important for them. Amir tells him, why don't you get another pig? Well, you know, there are other pigs in the world. And, you know, our hero says, no, no, no, no this was my special pig. I need to get this pig back. I'll go to great lengths to get this pig back. That he'd have to train another pig and all this for a long period of time to get the pig to be able to do it. Okay, so Amir, then Rob fell, you know, Rob the guy living in the woods, right in the cabin convinces Amir to take him to Portland. But Rob is still unshaved. Like I did this in honor of Nicholas Cage and he takes him to Portland. And Nicholas Cage's, you know, roll he's still unshaved, still unwashed, no shower you know, because Amir says, you know let's put in a off grid shower in for you, you know and a heater so you can clean up. And he says, no, no, I'm fine. So the bottom line is he convinces Amir to take him to Portland because he figures he was able, he know, you know you don't understand at that point who he was that he would know what's going on in Portland, you know because 10 years. You never know, right? All you know is this guy from the back woods who's been beaten up who's still bloody his clothes are disheveled. He is filthy dirty. He doesn't want to clean up but he wants to go to Portland because Portland is really important to him. And little by little it rolls out little by little you find out that he knows a lot about Portland. So what was that chapter in his life? He, now I can get into what I alluded to too early. He was a famous chef and restaurateur like Alan Wong here in Hawaii, hallelujah. He's famous, he was famous, right? And he had a negative turn in life, like all of us. Like one of the things I wanted to get in every one of us, if we don't die young we lose our parents. Loss is part of life. Bottom line, life is about loss and life in this world always and today is about money. And these are the two themes that the writer and the director and the producer are trying to interplay in this movie to give lessons in life. What is important in life? It's love. Love or money, love is more important. If you can have all the money in the world if you don't have any love in your life. So you begin to find out that Rob has sorted all this out. He is not into money, although he could be. He is into dealing with loss and creating a kind of lonely existence. But it works for him. He's very introspective. He's very philosophical and what's interesting is you learn this just little by little because in fact, the dialogue in this movie with Nicholas Cage is really minimal. He doesn't talk very much. And his sentences, his explanations are like one word, always very short explanation about what he's doing. And most of his conversations, he's silent and you begin to realize the power of the character. Nicholas Cage played this role to a team. He's ex, as you've said, one of his best roles that he's ever played. And he's playing a traumatized individual, someone who was traumatized. Rob was traumatized and that's what drove him to go to the woods and give up his famous life. I mean, he was famous in Portland, right? And eventually you get to understand that his wife died young suddenly, right? And a lot of people who go into his negative states of mind, they have a traumatic experience whether it's financial or death in the family or illness that drives them into this. Now, you know, I've had unbelievable hits in life but you gotta go on, you know? That's the lesson for me, you know, that seeing Rob, how he fell apart when his wife died, Lori, her name was Lori. And then you realize that at the end, that cassette was his wife singing, who he loved very much. And then she died very tragically at a young age. Well, there were parts of it, you know, parts of the church that I did not really understand. For example, Amir takes him to a place where he talks to a very grungy low life type of guy and Rob gets into this intentional situation where they're beating him up, viciously beating him up. And he doesn't raise a hand, he doesn't. And you're saying to yourself, you know, if he raised a hand, he's strong enough, he's focused enough to, you know, beat the daylights out of these people around him. But he doesn't do that, it's almost masochistic. Did you understand why he did that? What was going on there? It's for money, he made money doing this. I mean, that was something where they have fighters, right, and people pay to watch this, right? And he needed the money, and he also wanted to make underworld contacts, you know, from this bad guy to try to see how he could find his pig. He seems totally focused, totally focused on finding the pig. This is what he wanted to do, find the pig, right? So bottom line is here, that's what that was all about, right? You sort of have to pull back a little bit and understand. And then, so he's totally trying, I mean, but basically, as I said, totally focused and everything he does is to find the pig. So he didn't really care about reconnecting with his old life in Portland. No. That was of no consequence to him. All he wanted to do was find the pig. He had no money. My definition, you know, he was living in the woods in a scrubby situation, and he didn't have any money. So I guess he went to that low life dog fight in order to raise a few bucks. And also, don't you remember, also to make contact with the underworld people who might have stolen his pig? He wanted to find out who they were. This was a mission. It was a journey. It was an investigation. Where are those people? Who are they? How can I get my pig back, right? So that's what he's trying to do. And that was his total focus, is to do that, right? So eventually, little by little, you get little clues, right? To Lori, you know, they showed the mausoleum where she's buried, and he must have put all his wine and some of his belongings at the mausoleum, storing them at the mausoleum. Because the director of the mausoleum comes in and later on and gives him a bottle of wine from their cellar and then shows him Lori's place where she's buried in the mausoleum and says, I'm keeping the next one for you, you know? So, you know, the next space right next to that. So it all starts to come together, little by little, but it was the key. But you don't see it coming. You know, he's focused on his thing and he winds up running into people, sometimes by intentions, sometimes by accident, who know him and they're intimidated by his reputation. There was one scene where he was meeting, it was, Amir took him to a restaurant and the guy who owned the restaurant, who was a bit of a schlub, the guy said, Rob, it's you, you're back. You're one of the best chefs that Portland has ever seen and you're here. And here's the restaurant owner pandering to a guy who is an obvious bum in front, I mean, an apparent bum, who's in front of all his clientele in the restaurant. And, you know, he probably lost some branding there because this was not consistent with a high-end restaurant for him to cater to a bum. But you begin to learn that even the high-end restaurants and all the owners of the restaurants and all the fancy chefs in the restaurants in Portland, they all knew Rob, but they didn't know what to do with him. They knew him, they admired him, they remembered him, but they didn't know what to do with him. It was a little unrealistic that in his state, bloody and smelly and unshaven, that he would be sitting there in the restaurant no matter who he is, you know? I mean, that was a little unrealistic. And he never changes his demeanor throughout the movie. You know, he's always got a little blood on his face, unshaved, smelly, you know? But Nicholas Cage, as you said, very subtly with very little words and the plot, you get to get the picture down the line of what happened, right? But you have to watch carefully. You have to take the clues as they come. They're not doing you any favors. They're putting a burden on the viewer. I really like a movie like that. You have to figure it out. You have to track on every little scene, every little piece of dialogue in order to find out what's going on. And that's like life, isn't it? You have to make an examination in your own mind. What's going on with these people? It's just like living your life. Stellar performance by Nicholas Cage. Cage, Stellar, Stellar. You know, one of the things I also wanted to say is we're all going to be hit in life with loss of loved ones, maybe sometimes financial loss, loss of work, loss of reputation, but you've got to go on. And that's one of the lessons my parents gave me. Nicholas Cage is not trying to achieve anything here. I mean, you know from scene one what he's trying to achieve. He's not trying to get back to Portland. He's not trying to be a chef again. And the people around him have all changed and Amir is changing while you watch. And Amir's father, who is a kind of, as you said, a kind of mobster who lives in an extraordinary house in Portland, really beautiful house. But I didn't understand exactly what the engagement was, what the dynamic was. The guy was essentially miserable, the mobster. His life had deteriorated. He didn't get along with his son, Amir. He didn't have a life. And he was very pompous and arrogant in all this. And he was nasty to Nicholas Cage. And Nicholas Cage just maintained his stability, maintained his strength of his character. And you saw the mobster begin to deteriorate right in front of him. I mean, from a guy who was a really nasty, threatening sort of individual, all of a sudden he fell apart. Do you understand that scene? That was most remarkable. What happened? I understood it completely. Rob understood because he has a memory. He said he remembers every meal he cooked for every client. Right, that's a very important line for the movie. And the thing that you might have missed is that Darius's wife was in a coma in the hospital. But Amir, she had tried to commit suicide living with this guy. I mean, these bad guys, they have wives that sometimes just, you know, she had committed and she was in a coma. And Amir says, why are you still keeping her in that state? She's been in a coma for years. So what Rob did is he remembered Amir had told him that Darius and his wife were always fighting, but there was one time he remembered they had gone to a restaurant. And it might have been Rob that had done, cooked the meal, right? That they had this phenomenal meal with wine and everything. And they came home and the first time he saw his parents really stopped fighting and loving each other, you know? So that was the whole thing. Rob remembered that. And what Rob did is he recreated that meal because he never forgot a meal. Never forgot a patron, a customer. He never forgot a meal. And he cooked the meal again years later back from the woods, bloodied and disheveled and dirty filthy. In this mansion house, he cooked that same exact meal again for Darius. That was an extraordinary scene and Darius is just blown away. And Darius falls apart, starts screaming at him, get out of my house, get up. And then he completely lets down his facade, right? And then you start to understand that this Rob is still pretty smart. But, you know, I mean, I started, I know you didn't want me to go on, but I mean, in life, you know, he fell apart because of his wife's death and he made the best of it. And he shirked all the things of a famous life and in Portland and he went into the woods and he withdrew from society, you know, because that was his choice, right? That's why he recreated himself. Yeah. And it was different than his life in Portland, different than his life as a famous chef and restaurant owner. But he, in recreating himself, he found enormous strength. And you saw that strength all the way through the movie. He could be beaten and, you know, pummeled and it didn't bother him, didn't bother him. He was dirty, didn't bother him. He was bloody, didn't bother him that people saw him that way. He was a pillar of strength. He was clearly the hero of the movie and a different kind of hero, but a hero. And he tells Amir that all his fame was all worthless. It was empty, you know, there was nothing to that because the clients don't really care who you are. They don't really like you. They just, because it's all this fame and fortune and all of this and that money really doesn't matter. Fame and fortune doesn't matter. What really matters is those in your life who you love. And if you, you know, the loss. So, and that's the moral to this whole thing about, you know, he chose to withdraw completely. I mean, from society completely because it was so traumatic to lose his wife, right? Who he must have loved. And then in the place of the wife was the pig. The pig, because that was his companion. And then he tells Amir near the end that the pig wasn't really that central to finding the truffles. It was that he loved the pig. That was his companion. The loss of his wife who he loved. This was a female, I mean, he wasn't having sexual relations with the pig, but emotionally that was filling the void. And you find out that Amir, Amir's father, Darius, was the one who got those junkies to steal the pig because his son was telling him how good he was doing in his business. And Darius wanted to take the business away from his son. Darius wanted to hurt him. He wanted to hurt him. Make more money, you know. Money, money, money. We've discussed this before, you know. But, you know, I mean, I know you don't like asides, but my parents in Farmingdale, their best friend was Dr. Meierstein who had lost his whole family in the Holocaust. They had similar things. Dr. Meierstein came to New York and became the school district of position, opened a practice after a traumatic experience in Germany with his, he was with his German wife and his daughter. They had to leave Germany in 38 and his whole family was wiped out. So bottom line is we all make our choices. Rob made the choice to withdraw from society, right? Well, I think he was in pain and he found that he could lessen the pain by being in the shack in the woods hundreds of miles away from where he had, you know, lived most of his life. And I also, I think, you know, he, as I said before, he built a new life. And it worked for him. It totally worked for him. Now, you know, his life expectancy was not gonna be that great. And you know that he didn't have any of the, you know, accoutrements of a good life, but it worked for him. And I think the people who he ran into when he went back to Oregon, they saw that strength. And Meier grew watching that string and Meier was in awe of how Rob was handling things, how strong he was. And so did Darius, he's also in awe. But one of the crushing moments of the movie was when Darius admitted to Rob around that dinner that Rob made in this mansion house, this really extraordinary mansion house, that he had hired these guys to steal the pig and they didn't take care of the pig and the pig had died. So, you know, this mission that Rob was on at that moment came to an end, the pig was no longer alive and he was crushed. But you know, you're right about his way of dealing with it and maybe it wasn't so critically important. It was part of his resurrection, if you will, but he didn't actually need the pig. He could find another way to rebuild his life. It was tragic that they killed the pig out of negligence. It was tragic that they stole the pig in the first place. And so you left wondering, and then we really ought to talk about this, you left wondering, you know, what was this man really made of? What was his relationship with the pig and Ameer who he had known for a while? Maybe since Ameer was young, you know, like 30 or so, where did that start? And his very strange relationship with Darius. So, you know, the movie does not tell you these things. The movie leaves you wondering a lot of why this and why that. And at the end, Rob goes back to his shack in the woods and he resumes his life as a, you know, as a person in a shack in the woods. But the key thing- You don't understand it. You have, you're left thinking, what happened here? What was going on? I never really fully understood it. You helped me understand it a little better. I understand because as I said, my ex and I, we were trying to get back- Yeah, don't tell me about that. Tell me what happened here. That's exactly what I'm saying. Now, that's the key, Jay. At the end, he opens that player, you know, with the batteries and he listens to his late wife's singing, beautiful songstress, right? She's singing. This whole thing gets back to, he had this love of his life, right? And she died and he fell apart. And this is why he's living in the woods. It's almost like he feels guilty that he's still living and that she's gone. That's the way I got into the personal thing. That's the whole thing at the end. That's how the movie ends, Jay, is with him sticking that cassette in that player and listening to his late wife- He's still fixated. Yeah, okay, a moment now on the production values. The movie is a dark movie. You know, the color correction on the movie is dark. It's this never a bright sunny day. There's never a lovely scene, an outside scene. He lives in a dark place in the woods. His cabin there is a dark rundown cabin. And even the mansion is dark. Dark wood, dark rooms. You never really see the outside very much in this movie. You see him dealing with dark people. Darius is dark, troubled man. Amir has some promise, but he's also dark. The chef I mentioned in the fancy restaurant, the chef who used to work for him. I wouldn't say he's dark, but he's a clown. You know, he's not a serious human being. And what you have is this very heavy, dark character, Rob, running through his memories, his earlier life. And you learn about it looking over his shoulder. But he does not engage with any of that. He's merely passing through. He's having a moment of memory, but the memory is not of any great consequence to him. Am I right? Oh, totally. I mean, he doesn't wanna go back to his former life, right? And he only went to Portland because he loves his pig. And that's his companion. I mean, that's all he, and what was in the woods, except for Amir coming on Thursdays to pick up the truffles and pay him, he had no other human contact. He had no other contact with any other, maybe some of the animals in the woods. But the pig was his only contact. Well, he knew some of those rough and tough people up the trail in the woods. But clearly they were also dark characters and he had no relationship with them whatsoever. So this character, this Rob character is unforgettable. He's a giant of a man. He's a man who has dealt with adversity and loss and manages to have a resurrected life that works for him and that allows him to live alone. Sure, he's in pain, but he was in pain before. And he finds a path, he finds a way. And you are impressed with the strength of this individual. I was. Well, there's strength in him, right? But he basically took his loss of his wife and it changed his life, right? And, you know, I mean, he's living in the woods. You know, he's chosen. He's told Amir how empty his former life was, right? And this is his choice, you know? But there's still strength in him from how he became a famous chef. It's a story of heroism and a story of modesty. There's a modesty. He goes back and they all tell him he's the greatest guy around. And he doesn't care about that. He's not, as you said, he's not into money. He's not into power. He's not into fame anymore. He's shed all of those instincts. That makes it interesting. And, you know, I would look for another movie like this, a movie of strength, a movie of personal heroism like this. And I'm afraid that they don't come too often. And I'm gonna continue to look for another pig, George. We have to find one like this so we can make a comparison. But right now, talking with you today, this is a movie that's unforgettable. This is a movie which really doesn't have a comparison. You can't think of another movie that's like this movie. It's in its own category. Yeah. Anyway, George, what's our next one? I think you told, you sent me an email, something about the way America was or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's once upon a time in America, Robert De Niro. It's a movie that was made in the 80s, but it is a fabulous movie. It was fabulous then. And it's one of those movies that has not lost its, its, you know, its timeliness. Anyway, George, thank you very much for this discussion. Thank you for all the points you have identified around this extraordinary movie. And I look forward to our next discussion here on The Movie Show with George Kasich. Thank you George. Lessons for life.