This is probably Nicolas Cage’s best performance. Playing the twin brothers Charlie and Donald Kaufman, he carries a pretty heavy load in portraying two characters that are set up to be antithetical to one another. His range is on full display as we see him simultaneously being the life of the party guy who doesn’t think about things too much and receives loads of adulation, and then also the quiet, insecure guy who resents the other guy for everything he is and stands for.
He’s aided in large part by the genius script written by the real Charlie Kaufman, and so he gets a lot of fun mannerisms to play with, profuse sweating and eye contact aversion and nervous laughter. Down to the smallest of details, Cage gets to the heart these two brothers, from their opposing vocal tones to their posture. It’s kind of a master class in itself of what Cage can do. Maybe it’s a microcosm of his career trajectory, in fact. On one hand he could have gone the way of Charlie, being a deep and serious actor who took roles to express something true and good, but instead seems to have leaned more on the Donald route, preferring simple plots that are mere mechanisms to string together flashy action sequences that become dull and repetitive after a while.
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