FilmBlather.com

"For some people, money is like a foreign film without subtitles."

I say this often, but I looked for any possible excuse to like Matchstick Men. But it's a frustrating film for most of the way, a brilliant one for a few fleeting minutes, and then we are taken back to the beginning by an epilogue that manages to wreck the great, illuminating plot twist that immediately precedes. After Ridley Scott and his screenwriters show us why they have been irritating the hell out of us for nearly two hours, they go and invalidate their effective explanation. One step forward, two steps back.

The material is probably strong -- the source novel was written by Eric Garcia, the clever writer responsible for one of popular fiction's undiscovered treasures, the Rex series -- and anyway you would have to go to great lengths to overcome my general affinity for con man movies. One of the contributing factors to the film's ultimate failure is, surprisingly, Nicolas Cage, whose performance is gimmicky and jokey, making it impossible for us to have a stake in his character. He is so concerned with facial tics and other manifestations of the psychological disorder he is portraying, that everything else recedes into the background.

Cage plays Roy, a severe obsessive-compulsive who needs a constant dosage of little pink pills to keep his phobias from taking over entirely. Somehow, he still manages to maintain a career as a successful con artist, working side by side with his partner (Sam Rockwell) to pull elaborate and ingenious scams on innocent people -- one involving a fake sweepstakes and a water filtration system has to be seen to be believed. Though he has amassed a fair fortune that he keeps in a safe deposit box, it has been a while since they have endeavored to do something big. At last, a prospect comes along: a shady businessman named Freschette (Bruce McGill) who seems easy prey for a currency exchange con.

Around the same time, Roy runs out of pills, which means that a dreaded trip to a psychiatrist is in order. The psychiatrist (Bruce Altman) gives him the pills he needs, and also calls his ex-wife, who ran off with a bun in the oven fourteen years prior. It seems that his wife has no interest in seeing him, but his daughter (Alison Lohmann) does. They meet, more or less hit it off, and Angela suggests that she move in with him for a while. Before long, Roy is taking her out and showing her his line of work. "Mom says you're a bad guy, but you're not," says Angela. "Yes I am," replies Roy. "I'm just good at hiding it."

The pervading feeling throughout Matchstick Men is that it's just subtly off. Roy's relationship with his daughter doesn't seem right -- Angela isn't a real person, but more like someone's imagining of a teenager. The Big Con is treated like an inconsequential plot point. The psychologist seems way too accommodating to Roy's frantic demands.

Then, in a brilliantly conceived turn of events, all of those criticisms are dismantled, and the movie becomes a powerful story of accidental redemption. Then we see that fateful title card reading "one year later," and everything goes back to the way it was, that vague feeling of frustration coming back with a vengeance. The revelation proves worthless since I did not for a second buy its ostensible result. What a shame.

Nicolas Cage, so funny and chameleonic in Adaptation, simply fails to sell us on his character. There is not a moment when we believe that Roy is a real person, and not just some actor's conception of someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Certain scenes try to use his tics and mannerisms for self-standing comic effect, and the artificiality of Cage's portrayal becomes even more obvious. His entire performance is a gimmick, a shocking thing to come from such a veteran, acclaimed actor.

Ridley Scott is a talented filmmaker, and his subtle stylistic flourishes are effective in reflecting the protagonist's state of mind (or perhaps editor Dody Dorn is to thank). But try as he might, the movie doesn't work like it should. Sometimes it's hard to put your finger on why, and other times the flaws smack you upside the head. Matchstick Men is satisfying for about two minutes out of one hundred twenty.