Nicolas Cage Chases Fleeting Viral Fame In the Droll Dream Scenario: Review
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The post Nicolas Cage Chases Fleeting Viral Fame In the Droll Dream Scenario: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is a bit of a nobody. An unassuming, middle-aged psychology professor, he seems pleased with his relatively dull life, his marriage to his pleasant wife (Julianne Nicholson), and the ever-elusive prospect of attending a prestigious colleague’s famed dinner parties. He’s an expert at blending into the background, and seems mostly interested in his banal life of academia; his biggest dream is to publish a book about the psychology of ants.
Yet fame is thrust upon him when he mysteriously starts showing up in people’s dreams — not doing anything, really, just shambling about as people hide from bloody pursuers or tremble at a building collapsing around them. Suddenly, he’s gone viral in the most inadvertent ways, and the nebbishy academic finds himself literally on everyone’s minds.
The prospect of fame initially allures Paul, try as he might to shrug off movie deals and marketing bros (Michael Cera) who want him to sell Sprite to people in their dreams. Even the most principled of us would be hard-pressed to turn away from the spotlight if it were suddenly thrust upon us. But as Paul learns all too harshly, the public’s attention can quickly turn sour, especially as Dream!Paul suddenly turns violent; before he knows it, the same people who love him now hate his guts. And he didn’t even do anything.
We Live In a City of Dreams: Over the course of his decades-long career, Nicolas Cage has bounced from young, exciting actor to hammy action star to washed-up Redbox fodder and everywhere in between. These days, in a post-Mandy world, he’s largely reclaimed the public’s attention, and rightly so: his tendency towards big, theatrical histrionics and tic-heavy intensity lends all his projects, even his worst, a kind of unconventional allure.
In recent years, he’s leaned into the Meme of Cage: his Renfield relies on the audience’s desire to see someone like Nic Cage play Actual, Honest-to-God Dracula, and he even played several over-the-top versions of himself in last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Here, in Kristoffer Borgli’s follow-up to 2021’s Sick of Myself, Cage gets to entertain the cerebral and the silly in equal measure.
In one respect, Paul shares a lot of DNA with Cage’s downtrodden, defeated truffle hunter in 2021’s brilliant Pig; but Borgli and Cage pepper Paul’s pathos with bursts of antic disposition, not unlike when Cage played the neurotic, fictional twin brother of Charlie Kaufman in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation.
Dream Scenario (A24)
Dream Scenario works best when it focuses on Paul’s response to his sudden fame — the hidden desire for recognition that it brings out in him, the impulsivity of Paul’s responses to a level of notoriety he never worked for but always secretly craved. Pearly white teeth grinning through his scraggly beard, squinting through wire-rimmed glasses, a thick crown of unkempt brown hair bordering his bald head. Even before he knows about the dreams, Cage lets Paul’s snooty demons peek out in fits and starts; he shows visible disappointment when he figures out an ex-girlfriend (Marnie McPhail Diamond) didn’t, in fact, invite him for coffee to make a pass at him. He’s a mediocre man struggling against his mediocrity, and doesn’t know how to handle fame when he gets it, or how to manage it when public opinion finally turns sour.
Bad Vibes Terminated: Borgli infuses the proceedings with a welcome dose of dark humor, playing up the sadness of Paul’s existence and the claustrophobic squeeze he experiences when it starts to go sour for him. Take the moments where we actually see the dreams Paul wanders into: Realistically absurd while still having one foot in the real world, the kind of boring dreams most of us have. And along shuffles Paul, doing nothing, much to Real!Paul’s chagrin (he’d rather fantasize that he was saving people from crises or sleeping with “maybe thousands” of people in their dreams).
Admittedly, Borgli’s focus starts to wander around the halfway point, as Paul’s behavior in the dreams turns violent, almost a metaphysical punishment for the ways he’s let his newfound profile go to his head. (A fateful encounter with a marketing assistant, smartly played by Kimmy Schmidt alum Dylan Gelula, highlights the ways parasocial relationships can wear down anyone’s boundaries.)
Dream Scenario (A24)
From here, Dream Scenario turns into an erstwhile riff on cancel culture, as Paul sees his life unravel at the behest of people who begrudge him imaginary transgressions. Cue the crying about trauma (“Trauma is a trend these days!” he vents to his university department head, played by Tim Meadows), the perceived ridiculousness of safe spaces and therapy-speak, the attempted video apology that comes across as “insincere and self-centered.” His publicists try to pivot him into guest spots with Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. Try as he might, he’s not the master of his life: it’s in the hands of others who will discard him in a moment if the vibes are bad enough.
The Verdict: In this respect, Dream Scenario feels a little confused as to what it wants to say: It understands the ridiculousness of crucifying someone for something they didn’t personally do, but it refuses to fully let Paul off the hook for the ways his bruised ego digs him into even deeper holes. By the time it reaches a relatively rushed and indecisive third act, it can come across as insincere.
But considering this is an A24 picture co-produced by Ari Aster, some stylistic pieces fall into place: much like Beau Is Afraid earlier this year, this is a smart, caustic comedy about the innate patheticness of the human experience, and how one person can be crushed by the expectations and vagaries of others. If someone decides they don’t like you, there’s nothing you can do about it. If enough people share that opinion, they can absolutely destroy you. Combine that with an always-fantastic Cage, thoughtful and buffoonish in every gesture and tic, and it makes for a delightfully mixed bag.
Where’s It Playing? Dream Scenario is currently in limited release, and pops into your reveries (and theaters) in wide release November 17th.
Trailer:
Nicolas Cage Chases Fleeting Viral Fame In the Droll Dream Scenario: Review
Clint Worthington
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