Pro at playing con

27020912

Matchstick Men
PG-13
Opening tomorrow at area theaters
Three-and-a-half reels out of four

When you see a Ridley Scott film, you never know who’ll show up behind the camera.

Will it be the Ridley Scott who made one of the best female buddy films in recent memory (Thelma and Louise)? How ’bout the Ridley Scott who made one of the best sci-fi movies in recent memory (Blade Runner)? Or maybe the Ridley Scott who makes less-than-perfect films (Hannibal being one, although I liked it more than most people did).

I could go on and on, but you get the point.

Scott is hard to pin down as a director, which is usually a good thing. But it also means I didn’t really know what to expect from Matchstick Men, the new movie in which Nicolas Cage (somewhat of a chameleon himself) gives one of the best performances of his career.

There is one thing most Scott films (even the bad ones) have in common: They are unabashedly commercial, yet possess a craftsmanship and depth that most wide-release movies can only dream of. That is definitely the case with Matchstick Men.

Cage plays Roy, a lifelong con man who also has a serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Roy hasn’t met a floor, window or tabletop that he doesn’t want to clean the hell out of. His illness is kept in check by illegally obtained pills until one day he accidentally washes them down the drain.

When his friend and partner, Frank (Sam Rockwell), suggests a new psychiatrist, a chain of events is set in motion that leads Roy to contact his daughter from his failed marriage. Roy and Angela (Alison Lohman) bond almost instantly and, before long, Dad is schooling daughter on the ways of confidence men (or teenage girls, in this case).

Their relationship, and their lives, are seriously jeopardized when a big con goes horribly wrong.

There has been much buzz surrounding Cage’s performance as the conflicted Roy, all of it more than justified. Any actor fresh from waiting tables can incorporate tics and twitches into his or her performance. It takes a true wizard like Cage to allow us to like him after seeing his many sides. Roy may be a mess but he knows his stuff, and Cage pulls off the character with both overly clean hands tied behind his back.

Lohman and Rockwell are excellent as well. If I told you how good, it would ruin the movie for you.

Matchstick Men is an interesting movie, combining the precarious thrills of The Sting with a more contemporary drama about people on the fringes of society trying to fit in. It contains Scott’s usual lush visual sense but has more depth than usual. It is one of the best films so far this year.

Add yet another category to Scott’s repertoire and by all means, see Matchstick Men. That’s no con.


RECOMMENDED RENTAL

Anger Management is by no means a perfect film. It doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of the hilarious first 15 minutes, and the last 15 are a total copout. But it contains yet another scarily funny performance by Jack Nicholson and is intermittently funny enough to rate a marginal recommendation from yours truly. Adam Sandler plays a mild-mannered white-collar executive who is sentenced to an anger management class after a misunderstanding on a business flight. Nicholson plays the unorthodox but effective psychiatrist charged with Sandler’s care. I should also mention that, although Anger Management is no Punch-Drunk Love, it represents yet another quantum leap from the juvenile crap for which Sandler has become known.