All The World’s A Cage: Valley Girl. By Rufus Black.
Greetings, readers, and welcome to All the World’s A Cage, where every month we delve forth into the great and sacred ocean of motion pictures made with greatest movie star to have ever lived. So far, we’ve explored a rare TV pilot featuring Nicolas Cage, a movie wherein he is a glorified extra, and another where he may have an unnoticeable extra if he was even in it. But now, four months in, we may finally have got on to what cheaters and shortcut-takers may term ‘the first Nicolas Cage movie’. His career until this point has been a tour-de-force in retro teen culture, and Valley Girl is certainly no exception.
Review
Valley Girl was directed by Martha Coolidge and released in 1983. The plot follows the romantic entanglement of titular valley girl Julie and punk Randy (their names not being the only allusion to Romeo & Juliet) played by Deborah Foreman and Cage respectively. The ‘valley girl’ stereotype (which I had heretofore merely thought was just general ‘Californian’) was a relatively new concept at the time, and Frank Zappa’s song of the same name was released only a year prior. Zappa was interested in making a film about it, and apparently attempted to sue this production for infringement, though he didn’t succeed.
We open in – Oh look, it’s our old friend the Sherman Oaks Galleria! Aside from being a movie star in its own right (Commando, Terminator 2, and familiar to AtWaC from Fast Times), it is directly mentioned in Zappa’s song. So maybe his lawsuit wasn’t entirely baseless. We meet Julie and her friends, and pretty quickly I realised I needed subtitles. I thought I was pretty good at understanding Americans but this intonation, squealing, frying and bizarre dialect had me stumped. By the halfway point I thought I had it, but frankly I still don’t know what “For sure” means – seemingly anything and everything, depending on context.
I found the film much like the valley girls themselves – entertaining, imminently watchable, competently put together and faultless, yet with an underlying superficiality and lack of depth that may or may not be deliberate. When Cage turns up I settled into it a lot more, mainly just because his punkish and raw demeanour cuts through it all quite nicely. But even then, the character is seemingly defined as the antithesis of valley girl style rather than by anything else. There’s a curious moment partway through where Julie’s dad tells her how someone’s clothes, music and way of talking isn’t what’s important, but rather how they are inside. Counterintuitively, we see very little of how anyone is inside and an awful lot of clothes, music and ways of talking.
Incidentally, it is for this reason that Cage stands out so much. With the dialogue being so surface-level, it’s easy for the characters to appear shallow and vacuous, and most of them do. Nic is so contemplative, confident in doing very little and holding long gazes that one assumes there’s a lot going on in his head, even if he doesn’t really outwardly articulate it. Other stand out cast include Cameron Dye as Fred, who was ridiculously charming for a character everyone else finds ‘grody’. Indeed, he might be the only character you’d actually want to be around for longer than five minutes. E.G. Daily is there, credited as Elizabeth Daily. She gets to demonstrate a bit more range than the other friends given her affair plot line that never really comes to fruition. Come to think of it, there’s a few subplots that do that – Daily’s affair and the valley boy who gets seduced by his girlfriend’s mother chief among them.
Now I’ve been nitpicking really, as by no metric is this a bad movie. Everything rolls along at a compelling pace, the camerawork is sharp and engaging if not flashy, the sound engineering (though I thought it really struggled with sibilance in the opening) pleasantly unnoticeable. Perhaps it all felt ephemeral given that it’s a real snapshot of a time and place that either you have a nostalgia for or not. I imagine if you do, this motion picture is immensely satisfying, otherwise it’s solid enough without being hugely unique or individual.
7/10
Some Notes on Cage
This is where he is first billed under the Cage name, and Coolidge had no idea he was a Coppola when she cast him, which he has stated gave him immense self-confidence in carving out his own career. It was hinted at in a featurette on my copy that actually he was fortunate enough to be the last actor seen by the casting director and as such had his headshot at the top of the reject pile right where Coolidge saw it, and decided to call him back. Amazing, right off to lead roles from here on out.
As a Cage Film
How much of the motion picture is he in?
Most of it, and he’s utilised perfectly. Really, Deborah Foreman is the main character but he’s the most easily associable to the audience. He’s not on so long that you tire of him, and he’s absent long enough that you want him back on.
9/10
Could anyone else have played this role?
Perfect casting. Someone else could have played it, and it would have been entirely different. He really brings thought behind the eyes to this picture, makes perfect use of what isn’t in the script – especially in the many Cage-isms thrown in, like shaving his chest hair into a triangle or playing a wax flute when sad.
4/5
Does he get Uncaged?
Not really, but almost. “Like, fuck off, for sure, like, totally.” His drunken jags… he gets upset and a bit whacky, especially when he strangely manages to acquire a series of jobs in order to appear throughout Julie’s life, and does different voices and characters for each one. But no big moments as we later become accustomed to.
2/5
Would it suck without him?
That would be an unfair assessment, but it’s also true that I probably would never have watched it without him. He definitely elevates the whole thing and a Cage-less Valley Girl is a worse Valley Girl.
6/10
Cage Fight – Could Randy beat Nicolas in a fight?
First, a note on the scoring. It’s changed so we can avoid weird decimals for the final score. Now, it’s out of 5 – ranging from a landslide loss (0) to a flawless victory (5).
This particular fight is actually a hard decision. We didn’t see Nicolas fight but he’s definitely a bit more of a scrappy, lunatic opponent. Randy we do see fight, losing once and winning once. The first time, he was sucker punched and the fight broken up before he could retaliate. The latter he was knocked down quite easily and only won through strategic exploitation of his opponent’s unguarded groin. Not the best fighter, but he yields results – and a sneaky victory like that only demonstrates a cunning that would give him an edge. On the grounds that Nicolas is actually untested in a fight, I give it to Randy. But it would definitely be close.
4/5
Cage Score
Well, according to this it’s not as good a Cage movie as The Best of Times which is patently ridiculous. That should probably tell you how much faith you should have in this monthly gibberish. The Best of Times is still our best Cage movie.
70%
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