Dream Scenario, directed by Kristoffer Borgli and starring Nicolas Cage, screened at IFFBoston Fall Focus 2023. It puts an excellent Cage performance in an absurd comedy scenario, but becomes too ambitious—and ultimately muddy—with its cultural critique.
All Dream Scenario needed to win audiences over was a trailer alone: a movie about Nic Cage, one of the most sensationalized actors of our century, inexplicably appearing in everyone’s dreams and upending global affairs is a near-perfect premise—or in other words, a dream scenario.
The scenario in question: Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is a college biology professor who finds little professional or personal fulfillment. He has no friends besides his wife, his two daughters find him embarrassing, and most recently, he believes an old colleague has used his idea in a book without crediting him. This all changes when, inexplicably, people in his life begin telling him that they have been dreaming about him. The scope of these dreams expand to the point where Paul becomes a nationally recognized figure, and the plot follows his various shenanigans navigating this unexpected fame.
Nic Cage plays Paul as so comically pathetic that you kind of have to root for him by default, and one of his core character traits is that he’s lived a life of total complacency: even when he appears in people’s dreams, he stands there without interfering. But it becomes clear that behind his meekness is a deep sense of entitlement. By presenting its protagonist as both layered and unlikable, Dream Scenario becomes more than a high-concept comedy and posits itself as a character study—a showcase of how unearned fame can affect someone who deeply believes he’s always deserved it.
As Paul becomes famous, the primary conflict—at least initially—is that Paul wants to use his newfound fame to secure a publishing deal for the biology book he always dreamt of writing. His encounters with the head of a marketing firm, played by Michael Cera, constitute some of the movie’s funniest moments: notably, he wants to use Paul’s special predicament to advertise Sprite in people’s dreams.
A new conflict arises when the dreams people have of Paul take a dark turn. All at once, people dream of him inflicting violence, and he becomes a sort of public villain: he subsequently loses his job. This culminates in Paul creating and uploading a YouTube apology video as a see-through attempt to redeem face, which gets seen through by both the public and his daughters.
However, it’s here the movie begins to lose its earnest absurdity. Of course the movie has to end up tackling cancel culture, but Dream Scenario is no Tár, or any other movie that can intelligently balance its commentary with its subjective point of view. The focus of its critique becomes muddy, and it’s unclear what the movie wants to blame—or if it wants to blame anything at all.
Paul sees his punishment as wrongful, as he has no conscious control over other people’s dreams; the movie seems to imply that the dreams reflect Paul’s subconscious, and in his personal life he has become more callous towards his wife as he gains fame. All the while, the public is depicted as capricious and indiscriminate, and Paul’s marketing team puts him in Freddy Krueger photoshoots and sends him to France to capitalize on his newfound infamy.
The movie seems like it wants to take the South Park approach of making fun of “all sides,” but this leads it to an unsatisfying, and even disappointing conclusion, despite all the goodwill from its great Nic Cage performance. In the film’s eleventh hour a weird subplot is introduced: after Paul disappears from the public eye, a group of influencers start selling a bracelet that allows people to appear in others’ dreams, in a contrived jab at internet consumerism that highlights the pointlessness of the movie’s critique.
In its best moments, Dream Scenario is an absurdist Nic Cage performance vehicle with good jokes and an excellent premise, but as it goes on it becomes desperate to act as a grand cultural critique in a way that retroactively makes the movie less enjoyable. Not every movie needs to have contemporary relevance: sometimes, a fun scenario is enough.
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