Summer-Movie Memories: The Family Values of 'Face/Off'

Everyone has a beloved summer movie memory. But sometimes it’s not so much about the film as it is about where you were and who you were when you saw it. Yahoo Movies asked some of our favorite writers to recall the summer movie that meant the most to them, and why.

There’s an absurd dance move that Nic Cage does during the opening credits sequence of Face/Off: Wearing a priest’s cassock, he struts in front of a youth choir as it sings Handel’s “Messiah,” clapping his hands and jumping around before finally squatting down on his hands on his knees and swinging his head around. I know this dance move well, because I’ve seen my mother do it on the deck of a beach rental in Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Face/Off came out in 1997, the year I graduated from college. My family and I were at one of those moments of change: I was the last one out of school, and all of the kids had moved far away from our hometown, so our family was stretched tight across different time zones and burgeoning adult lives. But we still kept with our summer tradition of spending time together at the beach. I was working minimum-wage jobs to pay off my student loan, so a week off was actually a burden. The logic of family was starting to wane in the face of my finances.

The week went OK: Sunburns, alcohol, golf with my dad, Scrabble with my mom. But old annoyances resurfaced (one of my sisters is a bully; one can’t handle her alcohol; my mom can be uptight in planning family time; between my dad’s naps and his golf, it’s hard to get an hour of conversation out of my him; I’m sullen and moody).

So on Thursday night, as part of a tradition nestled within the beach tradition, we went to the movies. In the past, we’d see whatever blockbuster was out, enduring a decade’s worth of film franchises: Lethal Weapon 2, Patriot Games, Die Hard 2, Terminator 2. They all traded on familiarity and repetition, which was how the family vacations were starting to feel: Each family member reprising his or her expected role. Inertia had begun to settle in — not just in the movies we watched, but in our family itself.

That summer, we all smushed into my dad’s car to go see Face/Off. It’s one of the most genuinely weird movies ever made. Face/Off satisfies the requirements of a summer blockbuster (global terrorists! speedboat chases! standoffs!), but it’s also a movie about family. Cage and John Travolta, villain and hero, after years of antagonism swap faces and infiltrate each other’s family. Each does a better job at his fake role then either has done in his real role. The villain is a better husband and a better father than the hero has been. The hero is a better friend and father than the villain is to his disparate crime family.

And unlike most summer movies, it has a real ending. The villain dies. The hero returns to his family, recommitted. No sequel possibility — the story won’t go dieseling on for five more films, reboots, and/or spinoffs. The requisite explosions felt more real because of this end. It was a preposterous summer movie but one where things mattered because this was it. This was all we were going to get.

Everyone in my family loved the movie. We floated out of the theater in the bliss of ecstatic chatter that continued in the car, continued over drinks, continued as our mother did Castor Troy’s dance on the deck of the rented beach house again and again, every time one of us asked her to.