The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The actor doth protest too much is what one ends up thinking after seeing The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Instead of citing Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being Tom Gormican, who directed, might have added Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nicholas Cage. The plot, in short, has Cage, hard up on his luck, in the employ of the CIA, after accepting a one million fee from a Majorcan arms dealer Javi (Pedro Pascal) whose cinematic ambitions run afoul of his involvement in organized crime. The film employs a youthful Nicolas Cage doppleganger (Nicky), who's constantly involved in turf battles over who controls the actor’s imagination. The movie includes the kidnapping of Cage's film daughter Addy (Lily Sheen) along with Cage’s fictional recently divorced wife (Sharon Henson) together with the wife who appears in the Pirandellian film within the film (Demi Moore). One wonders if there wasn't a little bit of the impulse to reinvigorate a flagging career in Fellini's 8½ to which The Unbearable Weight  bears no resemblance. Ultimately the parody here is a thinly veiled attempt to do what the movie is making fun of, light Cage’s fire, invoking  Face/Off, Moonstruck and other of the actor's classics of the past. Good luck. 

read "The Dance of Reality" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to 8½ theme by Nino Rota