Two on a Match

CON HEIR: Roy (Nicloas Cage) passes on his love of high-stakes con games to his daughter.

Matchstick Men is a con-man movie with an identity crisis.

by Cindy Fuchs

Con-man movies like to be clever. Theyíre supposed to fool you. The hitch is that you know theyíre all about tricks, so if they can surprise you at any point, theyíve done something special. Matchstick Men, directed by Ridley Scott and adapted by Nicholas and Ted Griffin from Eric Garciaís novel, engages a peculiar trick: Itís a family melodrama dressed up like a con-man movie.

On its surface, this melodrama is as sappy as they come. L.A.-based smalltime con man Roy (Nicolas Cage) is feeling more and more fidgety, indicated by a widening array of tics and a Tourette's syndrome-like discharge of hissing and foul language. His tics emerge forcefully during a con he's tag-teaming with his protégé partner, Frank (Sam Rockwell, excellent in what seems an abbreviated role): The mark opens a door and sweaty Roy almost collapses under the threat of air from the "outside."

When he accidentally dumps his unidentified pills down the garbage disposal, Roy's paroxysms go into overdrive: At once anal and out of control, he scrubs his table legs with toothbrushes and compulsively repeats specific rituals (shutting every door three times, insisting that no one wear shoes on his carpet), but he also eats tuna from the can, chain-smokes (while he's scrubbing) and keeps his wads o' cash (wrapped in plastic) stowed inside a large china bulldog in his living room. In Cage's hands, such devices become grand gestures -- if Roy isn't quite as broad as Cage's turns in Vampire's Kiss (1989) or Leaving Las Vegas (1995), the character does suggest that Cage has been told once too often that twitching is effective acting.

As he's visibly desperate without his pills, Roy visits a shrink ostensibly chosen at random, one Dr. Klein (Bruce Altman). A couple of therapy sessions later, Roy discovers he has a 14-year-old daughter, Angela (23-year-old Alison Lohman), the result of a long-over and apparently painful relationship. Thinking that he needs to put right his messy past, Roy seeks out Angela, whom he first spots skateboarding along the sidewalk.

This scene, at once simple and intense, shows Scott's legendary attention to visual and audio detail, whatever genres he's mixing. The distinctive thunk-thunk-thunk of Angela's board punctuates Roy's first look at her from behind his smoke cloud -- earnest and pigtailed, she appears the ideal antidote to his corrupt and anxious existence, but Roy is frozen with fear, the camera capturing his disorientation as he scrunches down in close, low-angled frames. Their first meeting is predictably rocky, but Angela warms to him, understanding beyond her years that he's perpetually harried and self-absorbed, but a decent guy beneath the excesses.

Angry at her mom one night, Angela takes the bus to Roy's place, expecting that she'll just hang out and watch TV while he attends a "business meeting." There are two problems with this pseudo-reunited family scenario: Roy doesn't own a TV, and his meeting is at a strip club, where he and Frank are setting up scuzzy businessman Chuck (Bruce McGill) for a really big score. No matter. Angela is determined to forge a father-daughter bond, even if she has to make it up as she goes along. And since Roy is essentially incapable of taking responsibility for himself, let alone a child who prefers ice cream to eggs for breakfast, her sheer will needs to go a long way.

She's game. On learning what Roy does for a living, Angela does the movie-daughter thing: She asks him to teach her a con, threatening him by reeling off specifics concerning a recent sexual encounter. He's so undone by the thought of her activities that he agrees to her demands -- that is, he suddenly looks like an extraordinarily easy mark.

Still, even Angela is at the mercy of Roy's contradictory frenzies, as these shape the film's bizarre emotional logic. He's a distressingly ideal dad, so in need of his daughter, learning to accept his own imperfections as he sees them in her. And yet, their cutesy balance is increasingly unlikely and unsatisfactory: She takes him bowling, he includes her in a high-stakes con; she whines, he puts her name on his security deposit account; she cries, he agrees to quit the game.

All the while, he's making eyes at the supermarket cashier who remarkably resembles his much-bemoaned ex. This developing "relationship" intimates that Roy is making progress toward emotional maturity, or at least being able to introduce himself to a pretty girl, but it feels peripheral to the con-man movie, which you know has to come to its own fierce and (of course) enlightening end. Con men always learn moral and social lessons in their movies, their epiphanies typically conveyed via kinetically clever plot twists that you supposedly can't see coming (but actually can, if you're paying attention even slightly).

The fusion of Matchstick Men's con-man life lesson with the father-daughter business is awkward and rushed by film's end. The pieces come together neatly and instructively, and not a little sentimentally.