DAN WEBSTER:
It was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who said: “we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.”
The question, then, always has been: what exactly do those dreams and visions mean? That’s the situation that confronts Paul Matthews, the protagonist of writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s film—aptly titled Dream Scenario.
Matthews (who is played by Nicolas Cage) is a college professor whose lectures about his field of study, evolutionary biology, are… well, let’s not say boring. Maybe mundane? However you want to describe them, though, they don’t exactly excite—or even interest—his students.
This, though, is in keeping with Paul himself, who is an obsequious kind of person whose nice-guy exterior masks someone both conflict-avoidant and passive-aggressively resentful about what he hasn’t accomplished in his life. This last character trait becomes evident when he meets with a former colleague whom he petulantly accuses of poaching ideas he claims to have put forth first—yet then, in a whining tone, begs her to at least give him credit.
To make matters worse, he can’t even admit to his wife, Janet (played by Julianne Nicholson), the truth about the meeting.
Then something strange happens. Paul begins showing up in other people’s dreams. Those of his daughter Sophie (played by the actress Lily Bird), but others as well, including some of his students. But then, too, a number of complete strangers.
What’s even weirder, though, is that whatever is happening in the dreams, Paul appears only as a mere bystander. He’s as much a factor there as he seems to be in real life. Which is to say, not much of one.
And while this disturbs him, it also can’t help but flatter him as well. Finally, people other than those in his family—and, well, not even there—are seeing him, as he crows with delight, as someone “cool.” And maybe marketable, or at least that’s the initial consensus of a public relations firm run by Trent (played by Michael Cera) that attempts to attach Paul to an ad campaign involving, of all things, the soft drink Sprite.
Paul, though, is interested only in snaring a book deal, which is a kind of dream in itself because it’s a book that doesn’t even exist anywhere but in Paul’s imagination. And yet even the likelihood of that project starts to look dim when suddenly the Paul in everyone’s dreams begins acting threateningly, at which point Dream Scenario evolves into something closer to “Nightmare Scenario.”
For the first two acts of his film, writer-director Borgli—who, by the way, is a native Norwegian—manages to create a story about a guy who seemingly gets everything he wants only to see it play out as a slow but ever-developing horror story. Kind of like your typical sell-your-soul-to-the-devil tale. But Borgli doesn’t identify a devil, unless it’s Paul’s own fragile ego.
Instead, mainly in the third and climactic act, Borgli seems to settle for making a parable about the dangers of social media, about cancel culture, about how no tragedy is above some entrepreneur’s attempts to make a buck off it. Or maybe Borgli’s biggest concern is what the ancient Greeks referred to as “hubris.” Whatever Borgli’s concern, the problem is that in that third act he offers an explanation that is both too much and too little at once.
Maybe a book does get written, and maybe Paul does achieve professional success. But maybe, too, he loses everything else that matters to him—leaving him adrift in his own dreams of what might have been.
In some ways, this is an unusual film for Cage. For the most part he avoids his usual over-the-top performance, which in certain films—the recent dark comedy Renfield, for example—is appropriate. His Paul here is pitch perfect: a guy who has everything he needs, but lacks the wisdom to appreciate it.
As for Dream Scenario itself, Borgli’s film plays out just as a dream might, full of arresting images and twisted emotions—though, in the end, without making a whole lot of sense, no matter who is speaking.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is a senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com/7blog.