Darius (Adam Arkin) is sat down at the head of his bourgeois banquet table by his son Amir (Alex Wolff). Both are served a dish by the hands of a blood-encrusted, stringy, sweat-stained, Rob (Nicholas Cage), the film’s protagonist. The dim lights and candles of the Portland mansion cast sepia hues over the room, as Rob digs in, insisting the others eat as well. Darius does, but a few bites into the meal, still chewing, his steely exterior cracks. He weeps like a child, removing himself from the table.
Viewers of the film will know the reason he cries. The dish Rob serves Darius is the very dish Darius and his wife shared one evening decades ago, a dish that momentarily dispelled the clouds of gloom in their marriage and gave them an opportunity to smile together. The exposition is sparse and sporadic, but we are initially told that Amir’s mother (Darius’ wife) commits suicide only to find out later that she is alive though in a comatose state, leading us to assume that her attempted suicide ultimately fails, and that despite their poor marriage, Darius intends to keep her alive, at least.
So do you just wish that he’d let you die? -Amir
Usually, when I watch films, my analytical mind is whirring. I’m on it, finding cracks, spottin’ raccoons like George Costanza on the drive from Wurtsboro. I can usually walk away from a film and say, “This was good because…” or “This was bad because…” dismissing my emotional mind entirely.
But what happens when you can only feel a film?
I mean, it’s one of my greatest fears, to feel something without any understanding or emotional explanation as to why. I finished Pig but my analytical mind was silent. Instead, I felt an overwhelming sense of childhood.
I was 7 or 8 years-old again, at the dinner table at 8 Lillian Court, with my mother, my father and two brothers, the kitchen light always just a little too bright above the table, the house dusky dark elsewhere, vacant, and silent. Beef stew in a plain shallow soup bowl, a broken piece of Fragale’s Italian bread, now cold, with a careful spread of butter on it, and Ma repeating, again, that we could only have another piece once we finished the stew, the smell of the kitchen thick with vapourized beef broth, earthy carrots, starchy and absorbent potatoes turned brown from their soupy immersion. Beef stew night was the bane of my existence as a kid. To come home from school, hungry as always despite the Mary Poppins bag of lunch my mother packed for us every day (I still have visions on my little brother running after me with a forgotten jumbo brown bag lunch, my mothers own Rice Krispie treats falling out from the top because the bag was too full to fold down.), to eagerly sit down to an after school snack and ask the night-defining question: What’s for dinner? only to hear “Beef stew” was the adulthood equivalent of being assigned jury duty. The Portelli’s across the street heard our moans. We’d still be at the table long after Ma finished cleaning, slowly spooning our gelatinous-turning stew in between whimpers.
Then there were trifecta days. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, knocked outta the park. Farina, glossy with butter and milk, doused in salt; bologna or turkey on Dutch potato bread that stuck to the roof of your mouth with strawberries sliced and swimming in their own sugary juices by lunchtime, and brownies we had to eat with a spoon, turned fudgie and warm by the compression of our backpacks; chicken francese fried in parmesan cheesy eggs with lemon orzo and chopped parsley on top with so much butter sauce we didn’t even care about the side of steamed broccoli. Those days we loitered around the dinner table, waiting for Ma to be done cooking while trying to avoid being asked to set the table, our after school snack of a shredded mozzy (read: mozzarella) mountain poured over with tomato gravy from the meatball pot long forgotten. Seconds and thirds were common and afterwards, Ma would lay on the floor with us while we digested and fooled around delaying the inevitable clean-up, and I’d forget the other empty rooms.
Why this film, that one scene
Why it brought to the surface these memories for me, I can only guess has to do with the way I have supressed the role of food in my life. I’m no stranger to food-centric films. And for a girl who struggled with an eating disorder, my friends have been surprised that some of my most-watched movies over the years include Julie & Julia (2009), Ratatouille (2007), and It’s Complicated (2009), even Fatso (1980), amongst others, all for their scenes of food. Meryl’s kitchen, and her bubbling croque monsieur deftly pulled out of the oven for Steve Martin. Alec Baldwin, sitting on the bathroom floor against the tub eating ice cream, lavender ice cream, that his ex-wife made which he takes to be a sign that she hasn’t been sleeping. Ratatouille’s little dance upon finding a truffle mushroom and pairing it together with rosemary and a cheese he finds in the trash, his ecstatic response to three simple ingredients coming together in an electric flavoring. Meryl as Julia Childs, with her husband Paul, at a French restaurant, greedily inhaling as the waiter debones the steaming white fish bone by bone. These are the scenes I relish and replay in my mind.
When Amir and Rob recreate that significant meal and serve it to Darius one bite brings not just a depth of flavor, but of memory, enough to reduce Darius to tears. It is the most honest moment in cinema I’ve ever experienced, because that’s what food can do and why we hoard it and why we don’t take the time to cultivate it.
An elemental part to who we are, food holds memory and emotion, absorbs it like pasta does sauce, like a potato does butter, like a marinated piece of meat.
And sometimes, we fear food, real food, because it costs us emotionally. It’s easier to grab a “quick” bite, to reheat in the microwave, to eat on the go, to not have a hand in the making of what we eat, to eat alone, maybe. Anorexia Nervosa recognizes the high emotional significance of food, the way it can be a conduit for and a carrier of our emotional lives; Anorexia seeks to cut that off intentionally, but just how deep it goes, I didn’t realize until this film.
I walked away from Pig not thinking about the film but feeling it’s effects in my own life.
And that’s what a great film, a great story, will do because at its root, we have to always remember that film is a medium of storytelling. A good film will allow for appropriation. It will allow us take it in and realize it is, in part, our story and use it to understand our story and make our own story. A great film won’t stay on the screen, isn’t just to entertain. If we’re talking about film as an art, not as an industry, then the ideal is that we will walk away from a screen thinking about our own lives in ways we never have before.
I can’t analyze this one, and I don’t want to. I felt it and I got to know myself better, and I touched parts of my memory I hadn’t touched in a long while and I discovered a whole part of myself I had pushed down in my eating disordered tirade. And to accomplish all that, well, that’s a good piece of art right there.
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