Con Heir

RIDLEY SCOTT'S MATCHSTICK MEN

HOT REELS

You're tempting the gods of bad acting when you cast Nicolas Cage as someone with facial tics and obsessive-compulsive disorder—it's like asking A1 Pacino to be loud. But twitch and twitch some more is what the already twitchy Cage has been asked to do in Matchstick Men, a new film about con artists, and maybe this fighting-fire-with-fire theory of casting is a smart one, since the result is a performance that for all its surface mannerisms is one of Cage's more vulnerable and restrained. Sam Rockwell, on the other hand, playing Cage's partner in grift, preens and mugs with palpable joy; this is a performer whose self-aware physicality often implies a nearby mirror, but the camera loves him, too, and for most audiences he's still a fresh face, so all is forgiven. (For now. Check back 1 in two or three pictures.) And then there's young Alison Lohman (White Oleander), turning up as Cage's long-lost 14-year-old daughter and trying to secure herself a beachhead while the acting chops whiz overhead. Don't worry: she comes well armed—nature has granted this actress the gift of gawky phosphorescence, which is a fancy way of calling her Cameron Diaz Jr. Ridley Scott directs, taking what one imagines is a welcome breatherafter Gladiator, Hannibal, and Black Hawk Down— from mayhem and exposed organs. Genre-wise, Matchstick Men is a cross between the big-con picture and the scene-stealingkid-thaws-the-frozen-heart-of-an-emotionally-unavailable-loner movie. While the latter represents one of filmdom's more hackneyed conceits, Matchstick Men is too nimble, and too in tune with its own specificity, to bog down in sap— not much, anyway. By the end you may even wonder if the whole thing hasn't been a snide comment, inadvertent or not, on Hollywood's own con-artistry. (Rating:)

BRUCE HANDY