Dream Scenario
A24“Have you been dreaming about me?” asks Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) to the school’s dean, Brett (Tim Meadows), a few minutes after Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario opens. To be honest, who doesn’t dream about Nicolas Cage? The man has been a national treasure (pun absolutely intended) on the silver screen for over forty years. He continues to be one of Hollywood's most compelling figures, consistently refining his acting methods with the projects he decides to sign on to.
Since getting out of the direct-to-video industrial complex with performances that reaffirmed how versatile of an actor he was in Color Out of Space, Pig, and Prisoners of the Ghostland, Cage has been on a self-reflexive path, choosing roles that greatly benefit from his presence and reflect upon his legacy in the annals of stardom. It’s never been more apparent in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which sees Cage play a fictionalized version of himself and his more successful imaginary de-aged alter ego. Dream Scenario is an extension of that framing device, where Cage literally and figuratively becomes the man of everyone’s dreams, not realizing how much his stardom has impacted the world – for better or worse.
In that sense, the movie wouldn’t have worked without Cage leading the fort as Paul, a relatively modest evolutionary biology professor with an interest in how the behavior of animals influences human interaction. When he becomes an overnight sensation due to wandering around in everyone’s dreams, fame gets the better of him, and he loves the attention he now has. For once, he gets invited to dinner parties he’s always longing to be invited to and may potentially collaborate with Barack Obama if the former President dreams about him.
But he also desperately wants to write a book and get his research out to the world, and he believes the “dream” craze will be the gateway to that. He partners with a PR firm to hopefully get the ball rolling on that front, with the head publicist, Trent (Michael Cera), having many ideas to paint him as one of the – if not the most – interesting person in the world. But during that stint with a PR firm, he gets eerily close to doing something he shouldn’t, causing his mind to get warped and his appearances in other people’s dreams to get dangerous.
Paul then starts attacking, torturing, raping, and even killing people in their dreams, causing his students to fear him and feel uncomfortable attending his lectures, even if they aren’t real and he is not a bad person in real life. One of the film’s most nightmarish sequences sees a group of traumatized students being helped by a counselor to rewire their psyche that Paul isn’t a violent man, with him slowly integrating the gymnasium to acclimate students to his presence. Suffice it to say it doesn’t go well and sends Paul on a downward spiral of madness, with his dream scenario now turning into a total nightmare.
The first half of Dream Scenario is a total laugh riot. Cage sells the mild-mannered Paul with such enthusiasm that it’s hard not to get attached to him and the relationship he shares with his wife (Julianne Nicholson) and children (Lily Bird & Jessica Clement). Seeing Cage pop up in other people’s dreams and strolling out of nowhere with a quasi-grin on his face sent the audience in total stitches because of how random it is. But Cage is such a game actor that he’s willing to repeat that same pattern in many dreams, and it’s never boring to see him do nothing as the nobody Paul is. When a student tags his car with “LOSER” graffiti, it feels like an apt descriptor of how Cage approached the role: a loser who, despite a lifetime opportunity to become something greater than his current state, will always remain one.
When Borgli twists Paul’s dream into a living nightmare, Dream Scenario’s images become more evocative, with the print consistently jump-cutting to visualize Paul’s tormented mind, which struggles deeply not to be a physically and verbally violent man when the entire world is being violent to him for something he has no control over. The film then cuts to the nightmares, which remove the absurdity of Paul being a charming and useless man in everyone’s dreams to blunt violence, with Cage’s grin changing from harmless to psychotic. The shift is raw, but Cage’s expressions are so striking that they always feel natural to what Borgli wants to present.
Dream Scenario has Cage’s best performance in ages. One that isn’t afraid to question his status in Hollywood: is he still relevant, or has he been reduced to a meme? As incredible of an actor as Cage is, many of his recent performances use him as a meme. Cage finally played Superman in Teen Titans Go! To the Movies in 2018, which saw him memeify his canceled Kal-El from Tim Burton’s Superman Lives until he physically appeared in Andy Muschietti’s The Flash as an alternate version of the hero. His take on Spider-Man Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse also turns a popular variant of the superhero into a meme, while The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent celebrates Cage as a meme and not one of the greatest actors of our time.
It seems fitting that Trent wants to book him on Jordan Peterson or Tucker Carlson after the nightmare scenario occurs, as he believes turning Paul into a meme by making him an object of the culture war will save his public image. As problematic as Peterson and Carlson are, they are the subjects of the best internet memes, leading gullible people to sympathize with them. That’s Trent’s strategy, and it seemed to have been the internet’s when it came to talking about Nicolas Cage – he’s a legend because he’s a meme. Of course, the Cage memes are funny, and he brought so many memorable performances over the years (especially in Face/Off and Wild at Heart), but he’s also an impassioned performer.
No one can grace a camera like Cage, and no one can act the way Cage does in movies, good or bad. He’s a singular talent, and his contribution to the art of cinema cannot be overstated. As much as the world wants to posit him as a meme, Dream Scenario reaffirms, more than any movie he has made this decade, how incredibly gifted a performer he is and how he can emotionally carry a film on his back from beginning to end. Some storytelling aspects aren’t as polished as they should be, but Cage’s performance is so entertaining that it almost doesn’t matter in the grander scheme of the picture. It’s Cage’s time to shine, and he more than responds to the task.