Dream Scenario
Surreal Comedy ā¢ 102 minutes ā¢ United States ā¢ 10 November 2023
Director: Kristoffer Borgli ā¢ Written by: Kristoffer Borgli ā¢ Produced by: Lars Knudsen, Ari Aster, Tyler Campellone, Jacob Jaffke, Nicolas Cage ā¢ Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula, Dylan Baker, Marnie McPhail, Lily Bird, Jessica Clement ā¢ Cinematography: Benjamin Loeb ā¢ Edited by: Kristoffer Borgli ā¢ Music by: Owen Pallett
Dream Scenario – a suggestive title and one which begs the question ‘whose?’ – features another bravura performance by Nic Cage, especially in one scene from the final third of the film which mucks together a rare blend of defiance and righteousness, self-pity and genuine outreach, despondency and wonderment even if the wider world including his family see the performance, which he livestreams over the internet, as both bathetic and pathetic, nothing short of a real embarrassment as his eyes and nose redden and the spit sticks to his lips.
This time Cage plays Paul Matthews, a small town evolutionary biology professor who has tenure at his local university but feels like something is amiss. His job is secure and at least semi-respectable, he has been married for fifteen years and has a fine home and two healthy kids, yet he wears a perpetual look of anxiety and strain as though something is gnawing at him.
He arranges to meet with an old friend from grad school, seeking credit for an article she is about to publish in the journal Nature even though he tacitly accepts that he never really mastered the topic but at best mustered a few fledgling ideas. He surreptitiously records their meeting, which inevitably turns sour, and even as he flicks through the recording back in his car he can find no way in, no word of conciliation much less the smoking gun which might prove his case and earn him some acknowledgement, so he is left humbled and stewing over what he perceives as some cruel slight.
The relationship between him and his wife, who in fact inherited their house, carries a tetchy, fault-finding undercurrent while his youngest daughter has begun seeing him in her dreams, where he rakes leaves over by the swimming pool and proves utterly indifferent to a series of strange phenomena or mishaps which culminate in her being hoisted perilously up into the air.
An old flame runs into him and his wife in the lobby of a theatre and tells Paul that she too has been having recurring dreams about him. She now writes for what sounds like a cross between a psychology and lifestyle blog (‘Jungian stuff’ is her summation) and wishes to relay her peculiar dreams. Granted permission, soon enough the floodgates open and it seems like every other person has been dreaming about Paul, mostly as a passerby even where their dreams seem to demand a helping hand or some deeper kind of engagement. His university lectures become question-and-answer sessions, packed with curious students who have heard or dreamt about him yet are not a part of his class. Then suddenly the nature of all these dreams changes, and Paul this strangely necessary yet superfluous man, this idle wanderer with his bald head and zip-up sweaters, begins to seem altogether less benign.
Dream Scenario flits easily between real life and its visions or reenactments of the dream world, but each dream is broadly continuous and we can usually – though not quite always – tell when we are witnessing a dream. Yet some flickering at the edge of the screen, quick cuts and sudden changes of perspective show the disjunctures in Paul’s reality, a formal aspect of Dream Scenario which is especially prevalent during an unexpectedly intimate dinner at an old friend’s house which said friend’s wife can barely stomach, as she too has been the apparent victim of a bad dream.
Sometimes this gauziness and the muted colour palette of the film reminds me of eighties cinema while its psychological aspect bears a certain kinship with the heightened dramas of the sixties and seventies and their descendants. One might think at times of some of the films by Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski or even Krzysztof KieÅlowski and his Three Colours trilogy or more recently A Serious Man and American Beauty, one of the films to have faded badly from that list.
On the other hand Dream Scenario is often more silly and broadly funny than any of those films. Cage as Paul is sometimes cast as the kind of befuddled everyman which has proliferated on the small screen. Later the film tries its hand not quite so successfully at the kind of satire of modern wellness or influencer culture which was achieved to very different effect in Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore’s mid-nineties slow burn Safe and in the dark comedy series Search Party, which achieved a bloody-minded consistency of tone in each of its wildly different five seasons.
Some scenes are shot with a grim almost documentary-like naturalism while in others the satire is more overt, as when the now famous Paul meets with an upstart marketing agency whose leader (played by Michael Cera) tries to convince Paul on the merits of a line of late-night social media adverts for Sprite. The aspiring author Paul just wants to publish a book. His home life has been both stimulated and disturbed by his first flush of celebrity, with a night of fantasy loosely inspired by David Byrne’s oversized suit in Stop Making Sense obliquely fulfilled before an intruder threatens the safety of his family. His meeting with the marketing agency provides him with the opportunity for a more lurid late-night rendezvous, his awkward dalliance with the much younger Molly taking up much of the middle of the film. In both cases Dream Scenario dives into sexual encounters which are laugh-out-loud funny and unusually risquĆ© especially in so far as they carry more than a ring of truth.
What’s causing all of this seems ultimately unimportant. Is the groping and needy Paul somehow the instigator of his own downfall, his desires and ham-fisted attempts to enact them bleeding out over the unwritten page? Are his family and their dreams somehow defining or preempting how others see and dream about him? The film motions at several points towards Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and perhaps society at large has built him up just to tear him down.
Dream Scenario seems to have been parsed as a comment on contemporary phenomena like cancel culture and the fickleness of fame. But the situation which befalls and implicates Paul doesn’t fit neatly into any such box. Instead the film grasps more deeply in a bid to probe our own subconscious desires, or our more palpable need for recognition and admiration in any given domain versus those habits and routines which might sustain a simple life, including the wants and needs of a family. Or is it those staid old habits and routines which in the end wind up breeding resentment?
