Despite being a world-famous, Oscar-winning leading man and action hero, Nicolas Cage has spent his last couple of decades in the public consciousness more as a meme than as a human actor. The majority of Cage’s roles during this period have, to one degree or another, traded on this fact: Panos Cosmatos utilized him as a gonzo cultural talisman in his midnight staple Mandy; Michael Sarnoski’s deceptively heartfelt Pig is as much in conversation with its actor’s public history as a Rick Rubin comeback album; and, of course, last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent literally cast Cage as himself, essentially adapting the “Nicolas Cage meme” into a feature screenplay. There are elements of all three of these performances in Dream Scenario, which pairs Cage with the Norwegian satirist Kristoffer Borgli. The result, while perhaps not as biting as some of Borgli’s previous work, is a perfect vehicle for Cage, an often deeply silly man who is nevertheless frequently hypnotic.
The story will be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of vaguely spooky internet hoaxes. Cage plays Paul Matthews, a mild-mannered professor at a fictional Massachusetts college who, through no apparent action of his own, begins appearing in people’s dreams– first his family’s, then students and casual acquaintances, and eventually complete strangers across the country. Paul is at first chagrined to learn that the presence of his nocturnal avatar is mostly passive (even when his daughter dreams that her life is in danger, Dream-Paul simply stands by, raking leaves and smiling placidly), but as word spreads, he begins to relish this odd sort of fame. The problem, of course, is that he can’t control the actions of his avatar, and as his presence becomes increasingly malevolent, Paul finds his own dream of viral fame abruptly turning into a nightmare.
The main attraction here is, of course, Cage. Dream Scenario would probably work with a different lead– it’s a great premise– but it would be a vastly different film. With Cage in the spotlight, we are forced not just to imagine seeing a complete stranger wandering through our dreams, but Nicolas Cage– something which seems strangely plausible, even more so than it might with a similarly famous actor. If a study was released tomorrow claiming that a majority of Americans had witnessed Cage’s wild-eyed face in the middle of an otherwise unrelated dream, I would believe it.
Cage has become a master of modulating the various dimensions of his unpredictable screen presence. Here, he lands somewhere close to his nebbishy Charlie Kaufman from Adaptation, minus the restless creative spirit. Paul Matthews is, by the numbers, reasonably successful– a tenure position, a wife and teenage daughter, a palatial townhouse someplace like Concord or Wellesley (in actuality, Massachusetts is here played by veteran character actor Toronto)– but he is an absolute worm of a man, who commands no respect from his students, borderline hostility from his family, and can’t even successfully stick up for himself when a former colleague blatantly plagiarizes his research for a paper. Paul’s a nice enough guy, but you can’t help but get the feeling you’d want to wring his neck if you ever met him, even if you might not be able to fully articulate why. Paul is, in short, a nobody, inside and out.
It makes sense, then, that Paul would at first embrace his virality; it is, after all, the current path of least resistance toward, if not fortune, then at least fame. Paul’s arc is a familiar one in our Very Online times, from the cheerfully baffled local news interviews to the inevitable teary-eyed webcam apology (in this way, Dream Scenario would make an unlikely double feature with Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, which casts a very different spin on the milkshake duck cycle). The satire here is, unfortunately, a bit thin, particularly compared with Borgli’s searing art-world satire Sick of Myself (which played earlier this year at the Boston Underground Film Festival). Unlike that film’s hilariously flawed anti-heroine, whose trap is 100% of her own making, Paul is not overtly at fault for any of the things that happen to him, which makes the commentary about “cancel culture” ring hollow. Fickle as the internet is, it’s generally safe to say that a victim of cyber-backlash has done something to invite the wrath of the masses; that Paul is by all appearances a hapless naif muddles the analogy. Dream Scenario’s satire works when it’s taking cheeky potshots at the stupid world we live in (as when Paul visits a hilariously vapid viral marketing firm called “Thoughts?” run by Michael Cera and Kate Berlant), but it strains when you sense it’s trying to say something.
Where Dream Scenario truly soars, however, is when it leans into the absurdity of its premise. The heart of the movie lies in the dreams themselves, presented as self-contained jolts of pop surrealism in miniature. The dreams vary in tone (depending on the dreamer, as in real life), ranging from the mundane to the apocalyptic; each is presented completely straight-faced and with full production value, as if we’re flipping channels into a different movie for a couple of minutes. It is here that the genius of the film’s casting becomes apparent. Cage is a master of his own image: he is able to project the exact same presence from one scene to the next, whether he’s disinterestedly watching his daughter float into the sky or nonchalantly strolling through a stranger’s dream of being chased by a madman. In each dream, you know that Cage is coming, yet you still get a little jolt each time he appears. The dreams are at once hilarious, unnerving, and faintly poetic– a crossroads where Nicolas Cage more or less lives.
So where does Dream Scenario fall in the late-Cage canon? While it doesn’t quite match the inspired lunacy of Mandy or the cockeyed soulfulness of Pig, it understands its star far better than the dispiriting cheapies he’s most often found in these days– understands that Cage the actor and Cage the camp object are not an either/or proposition. Like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, it is perhaps a hair too self-satisfied for its own good, but it carries itself with such audacity that it’s difficult not to like. If he could, one senses that Nicolas Cage would find a way to sneak into our dreams; this, perhaps, is the next best thing.
Dream Scenario
2023
dir. Kristoffer Borgli
102 min.
Opens Friday, 11/17 @ Kendall Square Cinema and Alamo Drafthouse Boston
