Nicolas Cageand Don Cheadle in a scene from “The Family Man” 2000. Universal Studios

I know. It’s from 2000 and stars Nicholas Cage, but it’s not that Nick Cage from “The Rock,” “Con Air,” Face/Off” and “Bringing Out the Dead.” None of that hairy, noisy crap that Nick sailed forth to.

MOVIE INFO

“THE FAMILY MAN”
Holiday Romance, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Romance
A fast-lane investment broker, offered the opportunity to see how the other half lives, wakes up to find that his sports car and girlfriend have become a mini-van and wife.
Length: 125 minutes
Rating: Mild sex, nudity, profanity, alcohol, drugs and smoking
Director: Brett Ratner
Writers: David Diamond, David Weissman
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Téa Leoni, Don Cheadle

This is Nick Cage the actor, who was a good comic actor for the Coen Brothers in “Raising Arizona,” and good in more sensitive films like 1995’s “Leaving Las Vegas.”

My favorite is the Nicholas Cage of Norman Jewison’s gorgeous “Moonstruck,” where he played an Italian bread baker and teamed up with Cher to show what tender, sweet actors they really were under all that makeup and big hair. There, Cage played Ronny Cammareri, the angry, bitter younger brother with no left hand (he accidentally left it in the bread cutter when his older brother Johnny (Danny Aiello) distracted him). He was amazing.

In Brett Ratner’s “The Family Man,” Cage becomes the “normal” finance genius Jack Campbell, a top-of-the-stack president of a Wall Street firm and actually a good, sensitive guy.

It’s Christmas Eve, he’s about to close on a multi-billion-dollar deal, and his secretary tells him he has a call from someone named Kate, the girlfriend he left behind to take the job in New York.

He doesn’t take the call, saying Kate is his old girl he left behind to become Prince of the City.

He decides to walk home, stops at a deli for eggnog, and gets involved in a holdup where he talks down the gunman “Cash” (Don Cheadle), who will soon turn out to be a major Christmas figure throughout the story.

In this scene on a Manhattan Christmas Eve, always fertile ground for magic, Jack catches up with Cash but lets him go after a futile chat.

Jack then makes it home to his posh apartment and falls asleep. When he wakes up, in a modern “Christmas Carol” of a sort, the real story unfolds.

He’s Jack 13 years earlier, living what his life might have been had he not gone away to seek success and left his lovely Kate behind.

He finds, this Christmas morning, that he’s Jack the tire salesman now, working for his rich, happy father-in-law (Harve Presnell).

He’s with his beloved Kate (the lovely Tea Leoni), who is a beginning lawyer, a 6-year-old daughter too cute to believe, and a baby son who needs changing on his first Christmas morning.

Now the successful New Yorker finds himself dressed in Reny’s cotton pajamas, living the life he would have had, a normal middle American life in a comfortable old house.

He will have to walk through this home-style Christmas week, partying with his old friends, who aren’t aware of this Christmas miracle, and aren’t concerned with his confusion.

Jack is a “happy,” generous Scrooge without the three ghosts, faced with living a real, normal life.

The story takes him through this magical re-Christmas, one we might all wish to experience to see how lucky we really are.

Cash will reappear in three different jobs to check his progress and to offer to take him back to great wealth.

We get to meet his Kate again in New York when he accepts the call. She is headed for a new job in Paris, and in the final scene Jack races through the streets to catch her at LaGuardia Airport.

It will make you hold your breath when the past of two people meets the present, and offers the future … or not?

“The Family Man” can be viewed on Netflix. See it now before Christmas … and wonder.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.