*** (out of ****)
Starring Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Alison Lohman, Bruce Altman, and Bruce McGill
Directed by Ridley Scott & written for the screen by Ted Griffin and Nicholas Griffin, from the novel by Eric Garcia
2003
116 min PG13
Aspiring authors always ask, which comes first? Plot or character? The oft-heard answer is that a good plot will supply its own characters, or a good character will make its own story.
Author Eric Garcia must have been having a swell day when he dreamed up Roy, the hero/anti-hero of his novel “Matchstick Men.” Roy is so eccentric, so peculiar, that, once Garcia was done creating his attributes, a story must have fallen right out of him. He’s a con man and an obsessive-compulsive. The first requires that he know a lot about how other people work, their wants and desires, yet the second requires him to look inward constantly and to be self-absorbed. He’s like that poor guy who doesn’t really like people in general, yet finds himself working in public relations. Roy’s personality just screams conflict, and conflict, as everybody knows, is the basis for plot.
When we first meet Roy (played in director Ridley Scott’s new movie by, of course, Nicholas Cage), he’s taking his pills and just barely has his compulsions under control. His house is immaculate, his pool is leaf-free, and before he can go through any of its doors, he must open and shut them three times in rapid succession. The movie’s first scam, pulled by Roy and his partner Frank (Sam Rockwell), involves a prize from a too-good-to-be-true tele-marketer, followed by a brief impersonation of federal agents. Roy almost loses his cool when the marks leave a door open for too long; he begins blinking, twitching, and stuttering, and Scott uses a clever shift in frame rate, color, and the sounds of insects to show Roy’s discomfort.
An accident involving his garbage disposal costs Roy his precious jar of pills and, after scrubbing every inch of his house in a toothbrush-toting fury, Roy is finally convinced by Frank to visit a psychiatrist. (The shrink is played by Bruce Altman, whose IMDb movie credits include 3 doctors, one professor, one counselor, and one lawyer.) In the presence of the doctor, we discover just how self-absorbed Roy is: his wife was pregnant when they divorced 15 years earlier, and he’s never once looked into whether the child is a boy or a girl, his or another man’s, or even alive.
Roy’s daughter is played by Alison Lohman, who made a big splash in last year’s otherwise questionable “White Oleander.” (As Tip O’Neal will tell you, there’s no con movie that can’t be made better by a female minor.) She doesn’t know what to make of her dad, so she hides her anxieties with enthusiasm, which is more than we can say for Roy, who hides his confusion and exasperation with, well, nothing. Unless you count all his twitches, grunts, and violent blinking. They begin to establish a relationship, taking two steps forward for every step they take back, and he even teaches her to pull a simple lotto ticket scam. Yes, scams are wrong, and exposing a child to them is even worse, but they want to share things with each other, and this is why it makes him so happy.
Meanwhile, Frank has also convinced Roy that they need to stop dinking around with tele-marketing and make some real money, leading to an $80,000 job. The victim of the scam (San Antonio native Bruce McGill, who played one of many, many lawyers in “The Insider”) just must be up to no good because he wears polo shirts, shiny suits, and gold bracelets, all at the same time. That these two stories entwine is inevitable, but we really don’t expect the father-daughter stuff to be handled as well as it is. Daddy and baby both have holes in their lives that their new bond could fill. “Matchstick Men” wisely does not spell out the exact sources of these voids. We see something missing in the daughter in the way she always struggles to put on a good face, in the way she looks at the ground and pushes out her lip when she talks about her mother. We see the hole in Roy because a life of crime is obviously driving him insane.
Ridley Scott makes things perhaps just a touch busier than they need to be. The con men have their con man lingo, which keeps them pretty chatty, and leads to circular chicken-and-egg conversations with phrases like “you gotta spend money to make money,” to which the other retorts “but you gotta make money to spend money.” During those brief moments when they’re not yapping away there’s either a cut to a new angle or some music to fill things in (nothing says “caper” like Frank Sinatra). The noise and the jumpiness is alright, because this is not a contemplative movie, but a fun one, and the busy-ness lets us know we’re supposed to be having a good time, even when things may begin to look heavy. The big con is handled with precision and as much clarity as necessary. The script by brothers Ted and Nicholas Griffin does not include a whole lot we haven’t seen before in confidence movies (Ted Griffin was a writer for Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven”). But it gives everyone interesting and revealing dialogue, suggesting depths and secrets without having to spoil the mood by exposing them completely. Just listen to how Roy uses the word “protégé” when describing Frank: is he being ironic? Is he embarrassed for having a protégé at all? Or do we simply not have protégés anymore, and does Roy just not know how to handle having one?
Page two of "Matchstick Men." Back to home.