Hey folks, Harry here... Ya know, it is tough on a booze running cold blooded baseball bat bastard like Capone to feel all warm and cuddily... Just cause he ordered deaths on Valentine's Day doesn't make him completely without emotional ties to real human moments... But you see... Capone stepped in front of a screen with Leoni and Cage and... almost grew a heart for it all... almost. His eyes detected gauze on the lens... he felt the strings being attached... and Capone may be many rotten and evil things... but a puppet... he is not. Here's the boss of Chi-town.....
THE FAMILY MAN It’s difficult to dislike Nicolas Cage. However, it has been all too easy in the past to hate the films he been in. GONE IN 60 SECONDS was junk; CITY OF ANGELS was mushy junk; 8MM should have worked; and don’t even get me started on GUARDING TESS, TRAPPED IN PARADISE, or AMOS & ANDREW. But he was smart enough to get involved with edgy things like RAISING ARIZONA, RED ROCK WEST, and LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Many of his big-budget things have worked well, including HONEYMOON IN VEGAS, THE ROCK, CON AIR, FACE/OFF, SNAKE EYES, and last year’s BRINGING OUT THE DEAD. They weren’t all great films, but he made them work for him by injecting his own brand of spastic performing.
The closest we’ve seen Cage be the kind of traditional romantic lead that he is in THE FAMILY MAN was probably in 1994’s IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU. In THE FAMILY MAN, Cage is Jack Campbell a cut-throat investment broker who, having no family or loved ones to speak of, even makes his employees work on Christmas Eve and Day. Bastard! He’s not a heartless guy, but he finds that emotional ties get in the way of the thing that is most important to him: money. But he wasn’t always like this, the film opens with Jack and his girlfriend (Tea Leoni) at the airport nearly 20 years ago. He is on his way for a one-year internship at a fancy London brokerage. Then plan on getting married when he returns, but she begs him not to go because she has a sense that they will never see each other if he does. She was right.
Skip ahead to today. On Christmas Eve, Jack gets a message that Tea has called, and he immediately thinks that this sweet, mousy young woman he knew way back is still pining for him and feeling lonely around the holidays. On his way home that evening, Jack stumbles upon a convenience store robbery perpetrated by Don Cheadle. Let me interrupt myself here to say that nobody works the screen like Don Cheadle. He is the center of any film he’s in even if he’s only got a small part. And the parts don’t come much smaller than the roughly 5 minutes he spends on screen in THE FAMILY MAN. Cheadle can be hysterically funny one second and make you shake in your shoes the next. He can be as cool as a cucumber, or an insecure nervous wreck. If he were taller and a little more pumped up, I think he would have made a better SHAFT than Samuel L. Jackson.
Anyway, enough hero worship. Jack successfully stops the robbery, but the experience leaves him a little on edge and thinking about where he is in his life and what’s missing. He goes to bed that night in a well-manicured Manhattan penthouse apartment, alone. Next morning is Christmas. Jack wakes up in a two-bedroom house in New Jersey with a wife and two kids. This is the life he would have had if he’d not gone to London. Now, he’s married to Tea, he’s a top tire salesman working for his father-in-law, and he has no idea how he got there. Left to his own devices and forced to piece together the life he has built for himself as a “family man,” Jack is baffled as to why he ever accepted this middle-class lot in life.
At the height of his confusion, Jack finds Cheadle again, this time in the guise of an all-knowing angel-like figure driving Jack’s Ferrari. Cheadle explains that what Jack is experiencing is a “glimpse” of what his life could have been like, and like all glimpses, it will pass and his normal life will resume. But he doesn’t tell him how long the glimpse will last, but we know: it will end as soon as he starts to like it (for maximum tearjerker effect).
Not surprisingly (and believe me, there are almost no surprises in THE FAMILY MAN; everything’s pretty much by the book here), Jack begins to see the charm of living for each other rather than for money. His wife loves him for who he is and not what he is. His kids are great. His goofy friends (led by a strong supporting performance by Jeremy Piven) are fun to hang with (although they can’t figure our why Jack’s bowling skills have diminished over the Christmas holiday).
Look, don’t get me wrong. THE FAMILY MAN is a completely watchable and enjoyable film. The actors are strong. I didn’t even mention how solid Tea Leoni is in a part that could have been played very wooden. She glows even when the gauze isn’t covering the camera lens. But the film craps out as a life lesson-type of story. Since most of us aren’t dripping with money, it’s tough to relate to Jack’s emotional shortcomings as a rich guy. It may work for some as a catalyst to thinking about what life would have been like if you’d stayed with an old girl- or boyfriend. Director Brett Ratner (whose last film was Jackie Chan’s RUSH HOUR) enters some unfamiliar territory as a filmmaker, but nearly every image and word issuing from the screen felt much too familiar to me.
You may want to see THE FAMILY MAN as a statement on the strength and meaning of a nice nuclear family. That’s how I saw it. But really it’s high romance. The scenes between Cage and Leoni are filled with juicy chemistry, both when they snuggle and when they argue. Looking at the calendar of holiday releases, THE FAMILY MAN might also be the only “date movie” around for a while, another possible reason you may want to consider it. I was bowled over, but I wasn’t bored or insulted. Not exactly a overwhelming endorsement, I know, but I wasn't feeling very generous after this movie.
See you in a week, bastards.
