#25: It Could Happen To You (1994)

When people find out you’re watching all of Nicolas Cage’s films to try and win the lottery, there are two questions they generally ask.

The first is some variation on: ‘Why?’ or ‘What is wrong with you?’.

The second is: ‘Have you seen that one where he wins the lottery yet?’

I had, actually, already seen half of the one where he wins the lottery.

Life, it seems, is a series of peaks and troughs, and I once hit a particular low, when, newly single, newly unemployed, and with all my possessions stored in boxes in a friend’s spare bedroom, I found myself stood in a field near Staines with floodwater up to my knees. Clearly it had all gone wrong somewhere.

Perhaps it had gone wrong when I’d stopped watching Nicolas Cage films.

About three years before, while in something of a mental lull, I’d decided I was going to watch every film Nicolas Cage had ever appeared in, in order. Not to write about them, not even to play the lottery based on them (what a naive idiot I was), but simply to find the three funniest faces I could find Nicolas Cage pulling in each movie. I took screenshots and posted them on a Tumblr. But then stuff got in the way, things started going pretty well for me, personally and professionally. I decided I had better things to do: though I would claim I intended to carry on at some point, I basically had given up on Cage. About halfway through the one where he wins the lottery.

Could it all really have been a coincidence? Had I conjured a powerful force that had turned my life around? Had I then been punished for my lack of commitment to the Nouveau Shamanic, the dark art that fuels Cage? Or is this all just an extremely loose interpretation of the actual facts that happens to provide some tepid narrative to this delusional endeavour, while excusing the author of any real responsibility for being crap at life? Either way, I had to go back to the beginning and finish what I’d started.

Which brings us to It Could Happen To You.

Several things happened in 1984. Some of them were bad: Tommy Cooper had that heart attack on live television and everyone just laughed because they assumed it was a joke; Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his dad; I was born. But at least one of them was alright — a police officer offered to split any winnings from a lottery ticket with a waitress, instead of leaving a tip. He won $6 million, and in a true life heartwarming story actually did give her half instead of just pissing off with the money.

10 years later a writer called Jane Anderson took the gist of this, changed enough so no-one could sue, and turned it into a fictional lying Hollywood story (originally titled Cop Tips Waitress — it went through a variety of very crap titles before they settled on the only slightly crap It Could Happen To You). This script came to the attention of one Nicolas Cage, who passed it to director Andrew Bergman — in return, Bergman cast him as the lead.

Cage and Bergman had worked together on the slight but charming Honeymoon In Vegas, and It Could Happen To You is in a broadly similar modern day fairytale vein. There’s even have a storyteller — Isaac Hayes wanders about doing exposition.

It’s not a terrible film. Bridget Fonda and Cage are both extremely charming as put-upon waitress Yvonne and good-hearted cop Charlie, Rosie Perez is fine as Muriel, Charlie’s materialistic wife, unhappy (not completely unreasonably) that her husband has given away half their win. Stanley Tucci shows up as Yvonne’s grasping estranged spouse in a weird sub-plot that doesn’t end up going anywhere.

Where it falls down is that the script is just completely underwhelming. It’s light comedy with the emphasis on the light: the plot is vanishingly thin —the gist of how things are going to play out is obvious, the details perfunctory. Honeymoon In Vegas isn’t the world’s most complicated film, but much of its charm is in the silly bits in the margins. It Could Happen To You is straight down the line, and never stops to have any real fun. Cage’s performance is quite good — certainly his best go at ‘straight-forward’ acting so far, but it’s not particularly memorable, not a role that plays to his strengths.

Having said all that, when the happy ending inevitably rolls around I did briefly feel some fictional emotions in my cold dead heart, so I guess it does work on some level.

THE NUMBERS

Obviously, OBVIOUSLY, I’ve got to use the same numbers as Nicolas Cage uses in the film, right?

Except that the pissing New York lottery (or at least the version in this movie) uses a 99 number system, so not all of the winning numbers in the film can be used in the UK National Lottery.

Charlie picks 6,12,16,26,64 and 84, so I took the first four from the ticket, and added 2 others:

4 — Charlie and Muriel win $4 million, $2 million of which Charlie gives to Yvonne.

7 — The lottery ticket was bought on Wednesday July 7th, 1993. Or the draw was on that date. Or something.

THE RESULT

I did not win the lottery. Not a single number. Piss.

I’m not really sure if any of this is having some sort of mystically positive effect on my life. I certainly wouldn’t describe my current situation as a high point. But you know, it could be a lot worse, and I can, for the moment, still afford to buy lottery tickets.

The other day some blokes on a motorbike tried to rob my phone, but turned out to be really bad at robbing phones and instead just pulled my headphones out, let them drop to the ground and drove off. Was I protected by the power of Cage?

I also won a Sausage & Egg McMuffin in the McDonald’s lottery game thing, and have not yet ended up back in a flooded field near Staines, so maybe there is something in watching Nicolas Cage films after all.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Trapped in Paradise, the first film I’ll actually be watching for the first time. According to c0-star Jon Lovitz the cast and crew started referring to it as “Trapped in Bullshit”. So that’s sure to be good.