Letterboxd — Your life in film

Pretty bold to make your movie a big ode to Nic Cage and fundamentally misunderstand what makes him interesting as an actor. Genuinely feel bad for Cage, whose idiosyncrasies are reduced down to “randomly yells really loud.” The thing that occasionally makes his performances funny is Nic Cage can operate at a different rhythm from the film he’s in or the other actors around him. His choices are incredibly hard to predict. He’ll take a quiet moment and make it…

The most insane thing about the studio tampering with Robert Eggers’ vision for this is that they ruined what could’ve been a masterpiece and still ended up with a difficult and highly un-sellable film.
We all lose.
Having said that, I still loved it. There's some bad choices (the accents, mainly) and there's at least a couple scenes that you can *really* tell come from reshoots that are so OFF tonally and narratively that you just have to laugh and…

Could’ve been much better if it fully leaned into the absurdist comedy that it teased throughout, but it plays the drama way too straight for how ridiculous its subjects are. It becomes a repackaged story of marital strife, rise to fame, drug addiction, and subsequent fall from grace that we’ve seen many times before, and missing the sort of cultural historical pulse necessary to tell this story. Chastain is solid and Garfield is…sometimes just bad and yet sometimes also compulsively…