My anticipation for a good movie couldn’t have been higher before going into see Matchstick Men. With all the dogs that are in the theaters lately I felt this may be the one to break the mold, and it was. Sort of…
Matchstick Men centers around Roy (Cage) and his partner Frank (Rockwell). They are a couple of con-artists, or Matchstick Men, for movie purposes, that play on the weak or as Roy says, “People that don’t deserve it… old people, fat people.” The current con is to sell store-bought “water filtration systems,” to the unsuspecting people for ten times their value with the promise of winning a great prize in the end, which is never collected.
With all his success in his “professional” life Roy’s personal life is a different story. Obsessed with cleanliness (agoraphobia) and without a personal relationship in years he finds himself in shambles. When his fear of the outdoors makes a scene on a “job” Frank recommends a psychiatrist.
Roy finally decides to go but still holds his belief that with a couple of pills those embarrassing ticks and outbursts will go away.
But, therapy takes hold and he begins to find himself admitting a little more than he supposed he ever would. Telling stories about a lost love and the questions surrounding the baby she was carrying when he left leave him wondering, what if…
He asks his psychiatrist (Altman) to contact his ex-girlfriend for him and ask about the baby, and to his surprise the 14-year-old daughter, Angela (Lohman), he never knew, wants to meet.
Matchstick Men is more than a story of the pros of a con-man’s life, but it tells the tale of a broken man and his attempt to salvage something out of the life he has created for himself using the daughter he never knew as a building block in the right direction.
Cage is Cage (for lack of a better description) as the lead character. Oftentimes Cage can get in his own way and while I still contend he is one of the worst actors out there he is satisfactory in this role as he provides laughter and emotion through his idiosyncrasies and his emotionally charged interaction with his new found daughter.
The meat of this movie however is Rockwell as he plays the perfect opposite to the agoraphobe, as the true criminal looking for the next buck and his next potential victim.
On top of Rockwell’s top notch performance Lohman, as the 14-year-old daughter of Roy, continues a trend of good performances. Alison had a breakout role in the 2002 flick, White Oleander, alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, but she steps into her own in Matchstick Men, making the acting look seamless and even sprouting a few tears for the camera without a hiccup. Even Cage is quoted as saying, “Alison is effortless… I never see the acting, she’s so smooth and full of life and fascinating to watch. She has the ability to tap into her emotional resources and come up with something real every time.”
This is all true and her performance adds to the movie more than may be expected. The emotions Matchstick Men portrays is an excellent look into the life of an unhappy con-man looking for his life and the truly unsuspecting world of a father who may have just found what he has been looking for.
With the praise out of the way the movie does lead to an excellent climax, but the ending is somewhat of a toss-up. Audiences will be arguing everywhere as to whether or not this ending satisfies the first 90 minutes. The ending turned me a little sour on the power the film had throughout, but it didn’t ruin the entire experience.
With the quality of the ending in the air, the quality of the acting is not. It is a pleasure to see Cage pull-off a role that he actually doesn’t ruin and the Matchstick Men would make a satisfactory matinee on any weekend.
