Matchstick Men

Nicholas Cage has made his career playing quirky characters with nervous habits and other issues. Here he combines all of them together to create Roy Waller a neurotic conman who suffers from agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive, and a number of other disorders. He is also a con man. A scam artist who justifies his work because he doesn’t take people’s money, they give it to him and he never scammed someone who wasn’t into the scam out of greed, Roy’s own brand of justification. Into his ordered but barely controllable life comes his long lost 14 year old daughter Angela played by Alison Lohman first noted in White Oleander. She brings a breath of fresh air into his life wearing her shoes in the house and bringing a healthy level of disorder into Roy’s overly ordered life. He has no idea how to be a good father, but he tries and doesn’t do a bad job. That is until he decides to be honest with the girl and tell her what he does for a living. Angela is intrigued with the idea and manipulated Roy into teaching her to con. He tries to draw the line as a responsible parent, teaching her the con but making her give the money back, but who is he kidding, he loved taking her along.

The other people in Roy’s life are his partner Frank played by Sam Rockwell and his new therapist Dr. Klein played by Bruce Altman. These two are pivotal roles but only Altman really seemed comfortable inhabiting his character. Into the mix is thrown a more major con, an unknown man with lots of money to throw around involved in a money change plot. I can’t see Roy getting so involved into a scam without better checking out his mark, but it suits the needs of the story. Hollywood is filled with neurotic thieves in the belief that their attention to detail would make them better, and more unassuming, criminals, think Billy Bob Thorton’s character in Bandits. The problem here is that Cage’s Roy can barely hold himself together long enough to finish a scam and it feels hard to believe that he could have amassed a fortune during his career considering how much of a hypochondriac he is.

I won’t give away the ending except to say that it was at the same time unsatisfying and satisfying destroying our faith in humanity while building faith in the home. This film treads a fine line finding humor in neuroses and crime but at the same time exploring the development of a singularly unusual individual in Cage’s Roy Waller. As with many of his films Cage’s brave and controlled over the top delivery make the movie.