Something to watch tonight: Friday 27 September

Pig (Sarnoski, 2021)

I’ve been want­ing to recom­mend this film for quite a few weeks now but was put off when my col­league at Stuff, Graeme Tuckett, recom­men­ded it in his Sunday Star-Times column back in July.

I want these news­let­ters to feel organ­ic and ori­gin­al, even though Graeme and I have sim­il­ar enough tastes that we are likely to coin­cide every now and then. He recom­men­ded the Paul Simon doc­u­ment­ary last week­end, sev­er­al days after I did here and I’m sure that’s just a qual­ity coincidence.

(By the way, check­ing the date of his Pig recom­mend­a­tion meant me put­ting the phrase “Stuff Graeme Tuckett Pig” into Google which is as good an argu­ment for work­ing from home where no one can see what you are typ­ing as I can think of.)

Anyway, Graeme’s piece is a good read, as he usu­ally is, but when I saw that Pig had just landed as a free stream at Māori+ I knew I needed to recom­mend it here (and share some of my At the Movies review from August 2021):

Nicolas Cage is Rob, a back­woods­man liv­ing in a remote cab­in. At first thought you think this is a peri­od piece like First Cow but then a bright yel­low Camaro nois­ily turns up with a box of gro­cer­ies. It’s driv­en by Amir, Alex Wolff, a sup­pli­er of high end ingredi­ents to top Portland restaurants.

Rob is a truffle hunter, and his secret is a pig who, apart from being the recip­i­ent of all his train­ing, also hap­pens to be Rob’s best and only friend. Not long after, the pig is, how do I put this, pig-napped in a dar­ing late night raid which leaves Rob badly beaten but determ­ined to get him back.

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Truffles, of course, are a rare and highly sought after ingredi­ent and the high prices they can fetch make any advant­age a hunter can get a luc­rat­ive one. The truffle hunters of Oregon are evid­ently pro­tect­ive of their turf and their meth­ods and, like so many busi­nesses where high rollers like to splash cash around, organ­ised crime is not far behind.

So, Pig is a chase film, as Cage’s char­ac­ter with his long suf­fer­ing driver Amir, search­ing across Portland for clues to the pig’s where­abouts. But, after a Fight Club-esque scene where I really thought I was going to lose my sym­path­ies for the film, it turns into a med­it­a­tion on some­thing else entirely – grief and the way that can devour your present at the same time as it strips you of your past.

As we go, we real­ise that all of the cent­ral char­ac­ters – maybe not the pig itself – are defined by the loss of a loved one too early, that sense of incom­plete­ness, of whakamā at being left behind, of not doing enough, the retreat from or the rejec­tion of society.

The script isn’t online at RNZ, you’ll have to listen to the whole seg­ment for the rest.

Writer-director Sarnoski, of course, also made the new pre­quel to A Quiet Place (A Quiet Place: Day One) which is also about a dam­aged per­son on a dan­ger­ous quest with a beloved anim­al at its heart.

Where to watch Pig

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix or Māori+ (free with ads). It’s also still avail­able on Blu-ray from Madman.

Australia: Streaming on Netflix

Canada, Ireland and UK: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Hulu

Further listening

Tonight at about 9.40 on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan, I’ll be talk­ing about Megalopolis and the career of Francis Ford Coppola. Do join us.