A college professor becomes a global sensation when he starts to appear
in the dreams of millions of strangers.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kristoffer Borgli
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula, Dylan Baker,
Kate Berlant
With his breakout sophomore feature
Sick of Myself, Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli gave us a tale of a
young woman who takes increasingly extreme measures to ensure she remains
the centre of attention. With his English language debut, Borgli gives us
the inverse of this setup. Dream Scenario is about a man who
finds fame unwittingly foisted upon him, ruining his life in the
process.
Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is a professor of evolutionary
biology who is so uninteresting he can't keep his students' attention
during lectures, is ignored by his daughters and passed over for
everything from dinner invites to professional advancement opportunities.
He's the sort of man nobody would notice if they passed him in the street,
but this all changes when he inexplicably begins to appear in the dreams
of people who have never even met him. It turns out the phenomenon is
global, making Paul a viral sensation. Suddenly he gets noticed everywhere
he goes, he gets invites to dinner parties, is propositioned to become the
face of various products, and his daughters even ask if he can drive them
to school to impress their friends.
At first, Paul's presence in others' dreams is innocuous. He's just
there, like that Twitter account that photoshops Paddington into scenes
from famous movies. But then he starts to take an active role in dreams,
sometimes even sexually, winning him the attention of women, and leading
to the cringiest failed coupling since that scene between Philip Seymour
Hoffman and Lara Flynn Boyle in Todd Solondz' Happiness (the
presence of Dylan Baker in a supporting role here suggests an
acknowledgment of Solondz' influence on Borgli's work). Paul is dubious about his newfound fame and uncomfortable with the
attention, but he sees an opportunity to exploit his status and realise his
modest dream of writing a book about his theory of "antillegence."
When Warhol famously surmised that everyone would have their 15 minutes of
fame he failed to predict that for many such fleeting fame would be quickly
followed by infamy. Just as he satirised the very modern phenomenon of
victim culture with Sick of Myself, here Borgli explores what has become known as the "Milkshake Duck"
sensation, whereby a nobody becomes widely beloved only to soon find
themselves a pariah when further details are revealed. Paul falls victim to
this when his dream persona morphs into a Freddy Krueger-esque nightmare man
who commits disturbing acts upon those whose dreams he haunts. Suddenly
nobody wants to attend his lectures, he's ejected from restaurants, denied
an invite to his daughter's school play and is embraced by the alt-right as
a victim of cancel culture.
At time of writing, this is the fourth movie starring Cage to be released
in the past two months. While the films have been of mixed quality, Cage's
prolific output can no longer be seen as the work of an actor sleepwalking
through roles to pay off his infamous debts. For about 20 years Cage was
something of a joke, providing ironic laughs with his over-the-top turns.
Regardless of the role, Cage put in the same anarchic performance for each
movie, sometimes disrupting films through his miscasting. In recent years
however he's begun to remind us what a good actor he really is, and what
range he possesses when he's reined in. He's become one of the most
malleable actors a filmmaker could hope to work with, a director's dream.
Watching him as the put-upon schlub here it's hard to reckon with this being
the same actor we've seen in such diverse recent movies as
Butcher's Crossing,
Sympathy for the Devil,
Willy's Wonderland
and
Pig. Paul is the sort of role that might seem better suited to a Woody Allen
or a Paul Giamatti, but within minutes of watching Cage's performance you
can't imagine the character being embodied by anyone else. Throughout the
film our opinion of Paul morphs from indifference to sympathy to hostility
to empathy, and it's the quality of Cage's performance that allows Borgli's
protagonist to take us on such a journey.
Remarkably, Dream Scenario is inspired by a real life
phenomenon whereby thousands of people around the world claim to have
identified a sketch of an unidentified man as the specific figure that
recurs in their dreams. The movie never really delves into why such a
phenomenon might occur, but that's not really the point as Borgli simply
employs it as a starting point to interrogate various societal issues.
Paul's courting by an ad agency who wish to experiment with injecting
products into dreams is a biting comment on our increasingly commercialised
world where everything is now viewed as a potential billboard, even our
subconscious. Paul's status as a professor allows Borgli to satirise the
well documented state of American college campuses, where we're lead to
believe the lunatics have taken over the asylum, filled with emotionally
brittle rich kids who have never experienced any sort of hardship yet are
terrified of being "triggered."
The three act structure of Dream Scenario might be broken
down as consisting of fame, infamy and indifference, the trajectory of many
who find themselves in the social media spotlight. While the first two acts
are thoroughly engaging, the film struggles to wrap things up in a
satisfying manner and ultimately never really offers any particularly
profound insight. As Paul's wife, Julianne Nicholson is wasted
in a role that fails to do anything of note with the novel idea that the
only person in the world who genuinely cares about Paul is one of the few
people whose dreams he is absent from.
Coming so soon after Sick of Myself, you might surmise that Borgli was under pressure to rush out a movie and
strike while the iron was hot. Perhaps if he had been given more time to
develop his script and figure out exactly what it is he wants to say here,
Dream Scenario might have been more roundly satisfying. As it
is, it's one of the year's most engaging and interesting movies for at least
two thirds of its running time, but its lack of thematic precision feels
like a missed opportunity to create a more lasting impression.
Dream Scenario is in UK/ROI
cinemas from November 10th.
