Nicolas Cage stars dream scenario (now streaming on Max), a surrealist satire that is the first English-language film from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli. At first glance, it seems like Cage might be playing an average boring guy, but the powerful and lovably eccentric actor is incapable of being average or boring (unless he’s in a National Treasure movie). He plays a college professor who millions of people suddenly and inexplicably find wandering through their dreams, a clever premise that had better be more Adaptation cage that Willy’s Wonderland Cage.
DREAM SCENARIO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Paul Matthews (Cage) puts milk on toast. Or maybe he puts the toast on it. Who knows. But he’s an average middle-aged guy (pot-bellied, unstyled glasses, bald) who teaches evolutionary biology. He has a wife, two daughters, and a suburban house that’s a little spacious but not too forgiving. He bores the students with sleepy eyes during class, then sits down to dinner and asks his teenage daughters (Lily Bird and Jessica Clement) to please put down their phones while they’re at the table. He carries with him an unfulfilled desire to write a book. Maybe he’s still up for having missionary sex with his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson), if she is, but most of the time, probably not. His life is beautiful, or at least pretty. enough. Some of us will look at it and feel way too fucking SEEN.
But I think deep down he’s an incredible weirdo. Sometimes, his eccentricities seep through his soft exterior. He’s a man of science who dismisses nonsense, which is nothing terrible, except that he’s a bit of an idiot about it. He seems to enjoy having the power to tell 19 year olds to stop talking during class (possibly because he has no real power anywhere else). He protests too much when his ego takes a hit, his insecurities leading him to puff out his chest even though he hasn’t lifted a weight in decades. He huffs and puffs when he fights back, and the words never come out right. It’s really… soft. And upset. And painfully unsexy. He also farts when he gets nervous, and we learn this in a scene where a woman who dreamed about him wants to recreate her dream about him in real life. I won’t say more, but he could be Nicolas Cage at his best and he could make you scream.
Right, the dream thing. This is what happens to Paul. His daughter sees him in his dream, waiting passively as the sky literally falls around her. And she’s not alone, because countless people have experienced the same thing, Paul just walks around, doing nothing while something strange and/or terrible happens to them. He has nothing to do with it, no mutant power of the X-Men causing the subconscious invasions, no explanation whatsoever. It’s just a strange phenomenon. He gets interviewed for a TV news segment and becomes famous and suddenly his conference room is filled with people asking him questions, and when he insists that he’s happier without being the center of attention, you don’t believe it for a second. . You fucking liar, Paul.
One explainable thing about the dream scenario (baby!) is that the more people see Paul on TV or in memes or whatever, the more people dream about him. This makes her want to profit from his fame. Not rudely, mind you. He just wants to get a book deal. He meets a group of nebulous people doing nebulous things, which I think means they’re in marketing. Do you work at a firm known as Pensamientos? – question mark necessary – and they are led by Trent (Michael Cera), who is not so much about Paul writing a book (it would be about ants, of course) and more about finding a way for Paul to hold a can of Sprite when wandering through dream space. Before he can even consider the surely lucrative offer of taking brand marketing into the hitherto unassailable realm of the subconscious, people start dreaming about him doing terrible, horrible things to them. Torture and murder and all that. And then they cancel it, for doing exactly nothing really, and at this point I think we’ve reached a point.
What movies will it remind you of?: If I were a gambler, which I’m not, I’m very shy in that sense! – I would bet dream scenario It’s in the same cinematic universe as Being John Malkovich.
Performance worth seeing: Cage is in very good form here. Without it, this movie might not work at all.
Memorable dialogue: Paul and Janet, in a fight:
Paul: We both know you score high on neuroticism. It is better to accept it and be pragmatic about it.
Janet: You high score on imbecility.
Sex and skin: In reality, none, despite the content of the aforementioned dream that is the object of recreation. In fact, that scene looks more like an outdoor shower in the Arctic than anything, you know, hot.
Our opinion: It’s pretty fun to see Cage find another performative team in dream scenario, bringing out his character’s strange, ugly little truths (his insecurities, his sense of masculinity, his longings) and bringing them to the surface so they can be examined through the distorted lens of this absurd scenario. And it is her performance that holds the film together, as it jumps from the psychosexual to the psychosociological to the psychosocial, and by the latter I mean psychosocial. media, who chews it as if it were a nut to be admired and spits it out as if it were a nut to be hated. Thematically, the film is an explosion of almost focused implications about where our brains fit in the world of the 2020s, which becomes either a scattered shitshow in the dysfunctional third act, or a very precise “this is our brain in he”. internet-any-questions? metaphor for the disorienting effect of the Internet on our minds and souls. Take your pick, although I contend the latter is a bit of a stretch.
Although the narrative eventually loses its clarity, for the most part, dream scenario is a terribly funny satire that gives us a chance to wrestle with another inspired display from Cage. His interactions with Nicholson find truth and comedy in equal measure, and he excels in moments when Paul is being tested morally, whether for the opportunity to profit from this unusual phenomenon (he insists to the Thoughts people? that he just wants a book deal, but we’re not entirely convinced) or to explore the kind of carnal pleasures that are far from his own (the film’s funniest and most dramatically powerful scene, and therefore its best).
What Cage can’t do, and what Borgli strives to achieve, is a lucid central idea, a central command brain for the many narrative neurons firing here. A little carving, whittling and cleaning of thematic brushes reveals, perhaps, frustration with the rampant illogicality of the collective functionality of the human species. Paul doesn’t do it consciously. do anything that justifies his fame and madness, and he finds himself absorbing adoration one moment and painfully absorbing hatred the next; It is a completely human impulse to enjoy good fortune no matter how it comes, and to regret it when it is gone. I felt frustrated not only by humanity’s actions in response to Paul’s situation, but also by the way he handles and reacts to those actions. He is a man of science who refuses to subscribe to anything religious or supernatural, and that is worthy of admiration, but he is also a deeply flawed inpidual who ends up defying his own internal logic for petty and selfish reasons. of which he sometimes seems unaware.
The overall result is funny, because it is Cage manifesting the neurosis; if he were a different actor, maybe we would want to strangle him for making bad decisions. Everything can always get worse, and it absolutely does for Paul, whose life falls apart, through no fault of his own. Except in a way it’s his fault, because he’s not the average, solid, boring family man he thinks he is. Cage delves into the darkest psychological corners of the character to find his misfortune and make it comical. There’s a lot going on in the performance and he can be fascinating on several levels. But I was left with the annoying feeling that dream scenario It could and should have been more than it is, with a conclusion that matches Cage’s complexity and enthusiasm.
Our call: There is a lot to love about the ambitious. dream scenarioso STREAM IT and let the debate about where it fits among Cage’s best performances begin and thrive.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.