Dream Scenario is one of six movie acting credits listed for Nicolas Cage in 2023. Discounting his blur-on as Superman in The Flash, five bona-fide movie appearances in one year is quite a thing, and he is the star of three of them (this, The Retirement Plan and Sympathy for the Devil), co-star in Renfield and had a significant role in The Old Way.
But we all know Cage’s tendency to turn up in any old rubbish, especially when a marriage has gone south, or property investments have turned to water. Rest assured, Dream Scenario isn’t the sort of Cage movie where he ships in, gesticulates wildly and ships out again. Nor is it one of those infrequent “proper acting” movies, like… delves back into the mists of time… Joe.
Dream Scenario sits in a space that Cage almost alone inhabits – of the left-field high-concept movie seemingly designed for the special kind of enhanced acting he’s made his own. Here he plays an inconsequential college professor who suddenly starts appearing in other people’s dreams – his daughter’s, a student’s, the maitre d’ of a restaurant at first. He has no idea how this happened and finds it kind of cute until he realises that in all these appearances he’s just a passive onlooker not the main event.
Soon, Paul’s strange ability – if it even is his ability – has gone viral and this mostly drab, nothing man has become not only popular but a celebrity. On the upside, hot young women want to sleep with him, on the down, there are people who want to kill him.
Writer/director Kristoffer Borgli works through the changes on this scenario as Paul, tiring of his supporting roles in increasing numbers of people’s dreams, tries to make himself more of an active interloper… and winds up in all sorts of trouble.
A meditation on the fickle nature of fame is the result, especially of the viral sort. Everyone loves you on the way up – Paul hooks up with a creative agency keen to monetise his ability, who want to connect him up with “Obama”. On the way down it’s much more savage, with Paul eventually finding himself backed into cancel corner, where only the alt-right are interested in what he has to offer.
Very much in this movie’s favour is writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s decision to feature so many of the dreams Paul finds himself in, and to shoot them stylistically in the same way as he shoots the rest of the movie – bright and clear, with an interesting compressed sound design that hurries things along. It’s hard to tell the difference between the real and the dreamed, which is kind of the point. But there is a fundamental difference, and that’s even more the point.
For all its pluses, this movie has run out of gas way before the end and would have been much better with 20 minutes lopped off. Borgli knows this and has attempted to pad out his plot with digressive stuff, like Paul’s old beef with a fellow academic, about whether she stole his research or not. This hasn’t much to do with the rest of the movie, though Borgli gamely attempts to tie it in to another subplot about Paul wanting to write a book, though never managing it, which speaks to his general indecisiveness, lack of drive and tendency to blow whichever way the wind is going.
Julianne Nicholson is good as Paul’s wife, and keeps an anchor on Cage’s dorky performance, which is winning and flexible. In small but tasty roles – Dylan Baker as a cock of a colleague, Michael Cera as a whizzkid new-media guy, Dylan Gelula as the hot girl who’s been having moist dreams about Paul.
The philosophy of Carl Gustav Jung is in here somewhere, in particular his notion of the collective unconscious. Borgli has admitted he doesn’t think much of Jung’s ideas but that they are a good peg for his movie. And the read-across to social media is an opportunity too good to miss. What Jung would say about the collective unconscious being exploited by 21st-century attention capitalists is anyone’s guess. That might be the sound of him rotating at speed in his grave.
Dream Scenario – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
