AT THE MOVIES WITH KASEY BUTCHER
The surprise ending is one of the most effective, but challenging, devices in story telling. It takes careful planning and talent. Often a movie will pull out a shocker without setting it up from the beginning, thinking that it will satisfy the audience. The truth is that if the ending doesn’t make sense or isn’t backed up by the rest of the plot, it just makes the audience mad. Luckily, Matchstick Men is able to pull off one heck of a shocker without angering its viewers.
In the movie, Roy (Nicholas Cage, Adaptation) is an obsessive-compulsive con artist whose slick young partner, Frank (Sam Rockwell, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), is looking for a big score. Roy, however, has lost his medication and is too busy cleaning every millimeter of his home to help out. Since Roy’s shrink has skipped town, Frank sends him to Dr. Klein (Bruce Altman, The Sopranos) in hopes of getting his partner sane again in time to make mucho dinero. As a form of therapy, Klein gets Roy to meet his fourteen year-old daughter, Angela (Alison Lohman, White Oleander), whom he has never seen. Angela talks her father, who is actually loosening up, into teaching her some scams and, much to Roy’s dismay, she has to help out with the big con that Frank has been setting up. Frank and Roy are plotting to get 80 million dollars from a no-good businessman named Frechette (Bruce McGill, The Insider) through fraudulent currency exchange. As for what happens next, I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.
Screenwriter Nicholas Griffin did a wonderful job with this movie. Matchstick Men is a little over two hours, but it never loses the viewer’s attention. Add to that the beautiful work by Director Sir Ridley Scott and Director of Photography John Mathieson and the result is an aesthetic and entertaining movie brought to life by light and humor.
The acting is impressive as well. Cage is both funny and sad as neurotic Roy. Lohman is so convincing as a bratty girl ten years her junior that it’s hysterical and hard to believe she’s really 24. Rockwell does the hard job of playing a comedic straight man superbly. Had the acting not been so good, this movie could have stunk.
One thing that can really make a movie for me is sound tracking. It is certainly not as important as the acting, writing, or cinematography, but it still adds that extra “umph” to a film if done right. Composer Hans Zimmer (Pirates of the Caribbean) did a fantastic job. The music has an “old school,” big band, mamba feel to it that adds to the quirky mood of the movie in a delightful way.
Let’s recap. I’ve used the terms affective, wonderful, beautiful, aesthetic and entertaining, impressive, convincing, superb, fantastic, and delightful. I guess I really liked this movie. I was running out of positive adjectives. All that’s left to say is go see Matchstick Men (and I need a thesaurus).
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