Any good con story will play with its audience, and Matchstick Men does just that. Thankfully, it also does a lot more. Adapting a 2002 novel by Eric Garcia (rather quickly, it seems, given the film’s release just one year later), screenwriting brothers Ted Griffin and Nicholas Griffin crack open the humanity of a story that constantly reinvents itself, before pulling the rug out from under the viewer and, more importantly, our protagonist. The brilliant thing about the movie’s twists, though, is that they are not the sensational acts of out-of-control storytelling. The movie, then, is more than simply a con story – it’s also a story about con artistry, the artists who practice it and the toll that a perfect con can truly take.
The film also, it should be noted, works as a sly comedy of manners, in which slippery people snake into each other’s lives for devious purposes and with only the arsenal of their personality as their weaponry. Directed by Ridley Scott with perfect, almost invisible management of these warring tones, it’s the kind of film whose cumulative effect sort of sneaks up on the moviegoer, who for some time is treated to something of a master-and-apprentice, con-artist-in-training story, flush with as much charm as that description can possibly allow. At the center of the movie is a trio of performances in perfect lockstep with each other and with the tricky material. It especially helps that these are richly developed characters, worthy of our investment.
Nicolas Cage, in perhaps the most Nicolas Cage-like performance of his career, plays Roy Waller, a man who exclusively performs short-cons by selling reasonably priced water filtration systems at an exaggerated premium to unsuspecting victims. His partner in this game is Frank Mercer (Sam Rockwell), and the pair really are quite brilliant at their jobs, operating out of a business office displaying a for-lease sign on the front (another potential source of instant revenue, perhaps?). Once their clients buy the filtration systems, Roy and Frank pose as agents of the government, approaching the victims but closing any loopholes for reimbursement before the real feds catch wind of it.
Roy also suffers from severe Tourette syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Credit must be given to Cage, in a meticulously balanced performance, and Scott, as a perceptive filmmaker, for not making a mockery of this man and his maladies. The tics that come with Tourette syndrome feel entirely lived-in and natural coming from Cage, who somehow manages to reel in the most theatrical components of his actorly gifts to play this role, but are also acknowledged as unintentionally comical at the right moments. The incident that seems to throw the plot into gear involves his syndromes, which require medicinal intervention until he knocks the pills down his kitchen sink’s garbage disposal.
At this point, it becomes difficult to discuss the particulars of the movie’s plot without revealing certain details outright. Frank is employing a long-con against Roy, having been bored with a life of no real scores and hitched to a wagon with a lot of problems, to say the least. His suggestion of a long-con to Roy involves Chuck Frechette (Bruce McGill), a disgustingly wealthy businessman from whom they plan to steal a high five-figure sum. Meanwhile, Roy has decided he wants to find the daughter he’s never met, from an ex-wife (played by an uncredited Melora Walters) who was pregnant during the divorce proceedings. He employs a new therapist, Dr. Klein (Bruce Altman), to make all the arrangements, and into his life skateboards Angela (Alison Lohman), a rowdy teenager with a mind of her own.
This leads to the mentor/mentee relationship at the movie’s core. Roy teaches Angela the ways of con artistry, and Angela reconnects Roy to a life as an honest man, which he has never led since dropping out of school early. The father-daughter chemistry between Roy and Angela is palpable in this story, and the unpredictability of the plot that follows constantly keeps us on edge as to how the contours of it will change. Eventually, of course, the other shoe drops: Nothing about Roy’s life is legitimate anymore, since “Angela” and even “Dr. Klein” are the fictions of Frank and Chuck’s scheme to rob Roy of his nest egg.
These three actors are brilliant, with Lohman delivering a performance that is itself a performance by a young woman with the potential of a bright future ahead of her and Rockwell tapping into his endless reservoir of charisma to play a man who must do the same for dirty reasons. Matchstick Men truly comes together in its multifaceted twist ending, in which the layers of the con job are revealed in earnest, and a spectacular coda, set one year later. It’s not about any further twist of the knife, but simply an encounter between two people who no longer need to pretend for each other.
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