City of Angels (1998)

Film: City of Angels (1998)

Stars: Nicolas Cage, Meg Ryan, Dennis Franz, Andre Braugher

Director: Brad Silberling

Oscar History: No nominations, though its Best Original Song Golden Globe nomination for hit song "Uninvited" surely got it close

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 (and now 2025) Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Meg Ryan: click here to learn more about Ms. Ryan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We've talked frequently throughout the past few weeks about Meg Ryan, her pretty effortless-looking stardom, and the way that she struggled to be taken seriously.  We've also compared her quite a bit to last month's star, Julia Roberts, and noted that the press was far-kinder to Ryan than they were to Roberts.  In 1998, when both of these women were arguably at the peak of their respective fames (Roberts was in the middle of a storied comeback, Ryan starring in two mammoth hits, You've Got Mail and our film today, City of Angels), it was pretty clear as to why.  While Julia Roberts had spent the 1990's with tabloid-friendly romances, her relationships with Benjamin Bratt, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, & Lyle Lovett were all messy enough to inspire reams of gossip, but Meg Ryan was the perfect counter to her as what a true "girl next door does"...they marry the boy next door.  Ryan wed actor Dennis Quaid in 1991, and while Quaid wasn't nearly as famous if you look at his movie output during the era, he was well-known, and they were billed as having a storybook marriage by the press.  A son (future Scream hottie Jack Quaid) was born from the union, and Ryan largely avoided the tabloid press, getting to be a movie icon in the vein of her frequent costar Tom Hanks that everyone could love without any sort of guilt.  As we'll talk about next week, that would soon collapse, but in 1998, there were few actors you wanted to be more than Meg Ryan.

(Spoilers Ahead) The first of her two big movies in 1998 was City of Angels (I only watch new movies for this series, and I have seen You've Got Mail, which I love, more times than I can count, which is why we picked this one), a retake of the film Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders.  The movie follows Seth (Cage), a type of angel-of-death who escorts people who are dying onto the next life.  He becomes smitten with a doctor named Maggie (Ryan), who cannot get over the fact that a man died during her surgery on him (this is what Seth is doing when he meets her), and Seth soon becomes obsessed with Maggie, and particularly that she can see him (which most people cannot).  He wanders around, trying to learn everything about her, while she questions the truth, and realizes she's falling in love with him.  After meeting another former angel named Nathaniel (Franz) who chose to live a mortal life, he decides to "fall" for Maggie, choosing to be mortal, but quickly afterward, Maggie dies in a car accident, and Seth, after initially becoming angry with God, chooses instead to embrace the joys of a mortal life, and living his fullest in the way that Nathaniel has done.

Wings of Desire is one of the great movies of the 1980's, a profound look at the meaning of life in a world that was becoming increasingly cynical and generic.  City of Angels, on the other hand, looks like a movie that is cynically and generically ripping off Wings of Desire.  The movie goes from misguided to being just plain bad pretty quickly.  Cage comes across as a stalker creep, acting erratically in some scenes and overacting in others, something common in his omnipresent movie stardom (he can be great...but more often he's not).  There are moments in the film where both Franz and Andre Braugher, playing another angel, are able to use their unique styles (both were big TV stars at the time this came out) to maybe approach something interesting, but Cage is giving them nothing.

This is true when he's acting opposite Meg Ryan.  Ryan's wide-eyed earnestness is no match for Cage, and honestly feels a really bad fit for a world-weary doctor.  Playing someone lost-in-love at a crossroads is where some of Ryan's best work comes from as an actor, but she can't seem to ground Maggie in something special, something that matches the cerebral beauty of what Wenders' did in the original.  Honestly the best part of City of Angels was the soundtrack, which is incredible (if you owned a radio in 1998, you will know the tunes by Alanis Morisette, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Sarah McLachlan by heart), but the movie itself never justifies its existence-see the original instead.