Flimflammery and fatherhood

Ray Waller is a con man with obsessive-compulsive disorder, inconvenient in a grifter who never gets a day off - or major medical. To his shrink Ray rationalizes his life's work by arguing that he doesn't actually steal, he's given money by greedy people who want more.

As played by Nicolas Cage - visibly twitching from short-circuited synapses - Ray looks like the guy least likely to successfully swindle people out of their savings accounts. Who would trust this agoraphobe who panics when he leaves his house, who hyperventilates when someone opens a door or window, exposing his tender lungs to unfiltered air?

Incredibly, when this neurotically fastidious guy pulls a con with his mangy associate, Frank (Sam Rockwell), Ray convinces their unwitting marks that he's a fed or a banker.

That's the high-wire act of Cage's highly wired performance in Matchstick Men, Ridley Scott's anxious comedy-drama about the man whose carefully ordered life is disrupted when his 14-year-old daughter, Angela (Alison Lohman), recklessly skateboards into it.

With touches of Paper Moon and The Sopranos, Matchstick Men is about how family ties tug unpredictably at the heart of an apparently heartless character.

But what distinguishes Scott's film from all other don't-con-the-con-man yarns is how the director depicts Ray's emotional and environmental disconnectedness. With abrupt jump-cuts and soundtrack distortions, Scott conveys the jittery discontinuities and disturbances in the field of Ray's perceptions.

When he seeks help from Dr. Klein (Bruce Altman), Ray finally relieves himself of the viselike anxiety strangling his heart and lungs. He confesses that he may have a child out there, enlisting Klein's help to confirm or deny his suspicion. Enter Angela, who is no angel.

Lohman, who totally eclipsed Michelle Pfeiffer and Renée Zellweger in White Oleander, handily steals Matchstick Men from the title characters. This is no easy feat given Cage's and Rockwell's showy performances. Here is a tiny young thing with huge talent and an unaffected air that has the effect of making everyone else look affected.

Surprising in a film about an obsessive preoccupied with controlling every mote in his environment, Ray is a chain smoker whose exhalations and ashes are inconsistent with one whose home is is so antiseptic.

There's definitely something wrong with this picture, but to say anything more would be unsporting in a movie that has a twist deserving of Chubby Checker.

While we're on the subject of '60s musical figures who straddle the fence between kitsch and kicky, the soundtrack to Matchstick Men mixes Herb Alpert, Mantovani and Wayne Newton, whose songs, like Ray, are stranded in another era.

Overall, Matchstick Men, which is based on the novel by Eric Garcia, is more memorable for Lohman's naturalistic acting and Scott's mannerist direction than it is for its O. Henry surprise.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Matchstick Men *** (out of four stars)

Produced by Sean Bailey, Ted Griffin, Jack Rapke, Ridley Scott and Steve Starkey; directed by Scott; written by Nicholas Griffin and Ted Griffin; based on the novel by Eric Garcia; photography by John Mathieson; music by Hans Zimmer; distributed by Warner Bros.

Running time: 1 hour, 56 min.

Roy Waller. . . Nicolas Cage

Frank. . . Sam Rockwell

Angela. . . Alison Lohman

Chuck Frechette. . . Bruce McGill

Dr. Klein. . . Bruce Altman

Parent's guide: PG-13 (violence, sexual content, profanity)

Playing at: area theaters