The 2019 Nicolas Cage vehicle Grand Isle is a Film, Technically
It’s weirdly comforting that Nicolas Cage continues to crank out forgettable direct-to-streaming nonsense even after his big comeback. 2019’s Grand Isle was just barely released after Mom and Dad, Mandy, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Color Out of Space reminded audiences why they fell hopelessly in love with Cage in the first place.
After a seeming eternity in the direct-to-streaming wilderness Cage was once again making real movies but he couldn’t quit the low-budget, direct-to-streaming nonsense that dominates the second half of his career.
I’m talking about movies like Grand Isle. The critically derided stinker alternately suggests a pornographic motion picture in which all of the hardcore sex has been edited out, a paperback novel in the Jim Thompson mold (but terrible) and a play by Tennessee Williams (but terrible).
What Grand Isle does not feel like, oddly enough, is an actual motion picture.
Grand Isle is set on the titular island, which may be in Louisiana but is a million miles away from New Orleans culturally.
The year is 1988 and Buddy (Luke Benward) is looking for work to feed his growing family. The Navy alum gets a gig that he will come to regret when Walter (Nicolas Cage) offers him a modest sum to fix his fence while a hurricane approaches.
Walter looks like shit. He has the sad, vacant eyes and sour disposition of someone who has not been sober in decades. He has spent long, wasted years marinating in sadness and failure.
At home Walter and his hot to trot wife Fancy (KaDee Strickland) cosplay as Martha and George, the squabbling couple of the heart of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Cage is at the center of Grand Isle’s marketing (he’s a slightly bigger draw than Luke Benward) looking as bad as it is possible for anyone to look. His scraggly facial hair couldn’t be less flattering. He looks like he stole his clothes from a Goodwill donation box. He has the facial expression of someone who has given up on life.
This was the movie’s appeal to Redbox renters: Nicolas Cage is in this movie and he looks terrible!
Buddy isn’t just a handsome young man; he’s a stud. He’s virile. He’s potent. He’s horny as fuck because his wife hasn’t had sex with him in six months because she just gave birth.
He is, in other words, everything that Walter is not. He’s also everything Fancy not only wants but needs. Strickland lends a pornographic flair to her sex-starved femme fatale.
In the porn movie version of this story Fancy pays Buddy for fixing the fence in sexual favors while Walter sits in the corner and masturbates sadly while crying softly and moaning his wife’s name.
Grand Isle is not pornography, unfortunately. It is instead an erotic thriller that’s light on eroticism and thrills and a gloomy Neo-Noir about the fundamental ugliness of human nature.
From the start it is apparent that something is very, very wrong with the couple and the house. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that everything is wrong.
Screenwriting guru Robert McKee insists that the key to writing successfully for film lies in surprise. He felt that characters should ideally be the opposite of how they at first seem. For example, someone who seems very strong could show weakness or someone considered a coward could exhibit bravery.
That is not Grand Isle. Every character here is exactly how they appear to be. Walter seems like a broken, toxic, alcoholic monster because he is a broken, toxic, alcoholic monster.
Fancy, meanwhile, seems like a Southern-fried sex bomb with a honey-dripping drawl and a need for sex that her impotent husband can’t give her because she is a Southern-fried sex bomb with a honey-dripping drawl and a need for sex that her impotent husband can’t give her.
Finally, Buddy seems desperate and a little sketchy but fundamentally innocent. He is, of course, desperate and sketchy but fundamentally innocent.
Walter and Fancy don’t have skeletons in their closets so much as they have skeletons in the basement and they are not of the metaphorical variety.
Walter is offered 20,000 dollars by Walter to kill Fancy on the dubious grounds that she’s terminally ill and would die soon anyway. He’s tempted but he also enjoys having sex with Fancy.
As a literal storm rages outside a figurative storm erupts inside. Buddy knows that he can’t trust Walter, or Fancy, but he also doesn’t have much in the way of options.
In Grand Isle’s trivia section it notes that Cage apparently improvised most of his dialogue and that the production ran out of money with two days left so they never shot those scenes.
At first I wondered why Cage didn’t just pay for those last two days out of pocket but if Cage had the money to do that he probably wouldn’t be acting in movies like Grand Isle.
If you don’t want this ridiculous film ruined for you stop reading.
It turns out that Walter and Fancy aren’t your garden-variety creeps. Instead they’re monsters who lock up Girl Scouts and unfortunate young men in their basement.
They’re the worst kind of criminals yet the movie ends by mentioning their evil double life but not showing it. I suspect that the exact nature of Walter and Fancy’s crimes/schemes would have been dramatized in the scenes that weren’t shot on the days filming did not happen.
Incidentally, nothing in this movie interested me half as much as the fact, while researching this piece I discovered an article ostensibly explaining the ending of Grand Isle that described a movie that was very different than the one I watched. It’s a version of Grand Isle that does not exist and differs greatly from the one I have somehow watched twice.
That, however, is a matter for another time. It’s weirdly comforting that Nicolas Cage continues to crank out forgettable direct-to-streaming nonsense even after his big comeback. 2019’s Grand Isle was just barely released after Mom and Dad, Mandy, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Color Out of Space reminded audiences why they fell hopelessly in love with him in the first place.
After a seeming eternity in the direct-to-streaming wilderness Cage was once again making real movies but he couldn’t quit the low-budget, direct-to-streaming nonsense that dominates the second half of his career.
I’m talking about movies like Grand Isle. The critically derided stinker alternately suggests a pornographic motion picture in which all of the hardcore sex has been edited out, a paperback novel in the Jim Thompson mold (but terrible) and a play by Tennessee Williams (but terrible).
What Grand Isle does not feel like, oddly enough, is an actual motion picture.
Grand Isle is set on the titular island, which may be in Louisiana but is a million miles away from New Orleans culturally.
The year is 1988 and Buddy (Luke Benward) is looking for work to feed his growing family. The Navy alum gets a gig he will come to regret when Walter (Nicolas Cage) offers him a modest sum to fix his fence while a hurricane approaches.
Walter looks like shit. He has the sad, vacant eyes and sour disposition of someone who has not been sober in a matter of decades. He has spent long, wasted years marinating in sadness and failure.
At home Walter and his hot to trot wife Fancy (KaDee Strickland) cosplay as Martha and George, the squabbling couple of the heart of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Cage is at the center of Grand Isle’s marketing (he’s a slightly bigger draw than Luke Benward) looking as bad as it is possible for anyone to look. His scraggly facial hair couldn’t be less flattering. He looks like he stole his clothes from a Goodwill donation box. He has the facial expression of someone who has given up on life.
This was the movie’s appeal to Redbox renters: Nicolas Cage is in this movie and he looks worse than ever before!
Buddy isn’t just a handsome young man; he’s a stud. He’s virile. He’s potent. He’s horny as fuck because his wife hasn’t had sex with him in six months because she just gave birth.
He is, in other words, everything that Walter is not. He’s also everything Fancy not only wants but needs. Strickland lends a pornographic flair to her sex-starved femme fatale.
In the porn movie version of this story Fancy pays Buddy for fixing the fence in sexual favors while Walter sits in the corner and masturbates sadly while crying softly and moaning his wife’s name.
Grand Isle is not pornography, unfortunately. It is instead an erotic thriller that’s light on eroticism and thrills and a gloomy Neo-Noir about the fundamental ugliness of human nature.
From the start it is apparent that something is very, very wrong with the couple and the house. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that everything is wrong.
Screenwriting guru Robert McKee insists that the key to writing successfully for film lies in surprise. He felt that characters should ideally be the opposite of how they at first seem. For example, someone who seems very strong could show weakness or someone considered a coward could exhibit bravery.
That is not Grand Isle. Every character here is exactly how they appear to be. Walter seems like a broken, toxic, alcoholic monster because he is a broken, toxic, alcoholic monster.
Fancy, meanwhile, seems like a Southern-fried sex bomb with a honey-dripping drawl and a need for sex that her impotent husband can’t give her because she is a Southern-fried sex bomb with a honey-dripping drawl and a need for sex that her impotent husband can’t give her.
Finally, Buddy seems desperate and a little sketchy but fundamentally innocent. He is, of course, desperate and sketchy but fundamentally innocent.
Walter and Fancy don’t have skeletons in their closets so much as they have skeletons in the basement and they are not of the metaphorical variety.
Walter is offered 20,000 dollars by Walter to kill Fancy on the dubious grounds that she’s terminally ill and would die soon anyway. He’s tempted but he also enjoys having sex with Fancy.
As a literal storm rages outside a figurative storm erupts inside. Buddy knows that he can’t trust Walter, or Fancy but he also doesn’t have much in the way of other options.
In Grand Isle’s trivia section it notes that Cage apparently improvised most of his dialogue and that the production ran out of money with two days left so they never shot those scenes.
At first I wondered why Cage didn’t just pay for those last two days out of pocket but if Cage had the money to do that he probably wouldn’t be acting in movies like Grand Isle.
If you don’t want this ridiculous film ruined for you stop reading.
It turns out that Walter and Fancy aren’t your garden-variety creeps. Instead they’re monsters who lock up Girl Scouts and unfortunate young men in their basement.
They’re the worst kind of criminals yet the movie ends by mentioning their evil double life but not showing. I suspect that the exact nature of Walter and Fancy’s crimes/schemes would have been dramatized in the scenes that weren’t shot on the days filming did not happen.
Incidentally, nothing in this movie interested me half as much as the fact, that, while researching this piece I discovered an article ostensibly explaining the ending of Grand Isle that described a movie that was very different from the one that I watched. It’s a version of Grand Isle that does not exist and differs greatly from the one I have somehow watched twice.
That, however, is a matter for another time.
