In the brilliant and utterly original comedy Dream Scenario, Nicholas Cage plays Paul, a hopelessly square, middle-aged professor of evolutionary biology, who suddenly starts appearing in other people’s dreams. At first, Paul shows up in dreams and does nothing at all (which is fitting for Paul’s personality), even failing to intervene as people dream that they’re in peril. When Paul’s students publicize the phenomenon on social media, thousands of people recognize Paul from their dreams and he goes viral.
His instant celebrity takes a turn when, through absolutely no action on his part, Paul’s behavior in the dreams becomes less benign, and the real Paul becomes associated with the threatening Dream Paul. Surely, he can’t be blamed for another person’s dreams, can he?
Dream Scenario slides from a comedy of manners into a sharply pointed parody of cancel culture, social media overkill, cognitive behavior therapy and our society’s impulse to monetize everything, not to mention today’s commercial imperative to leverage everything for micro-targeted advertising. Dream Scenario is highly intelligent and hilarious.
The guy who imagined this unique premise and all the killer moments of topical parody is Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose work I haven’t seen before. This is the 38-year-old Borgli’s third feature; I can’t wait to mine his previous work and anticipate what he brings us next.
The character of Paul is not your off-the-shelf Everyman. He is, after all, smart enough to have a Ph.D., even be a tenured professor, and he’s a reliable and well-meaning, if unexciting, dad and husband. Paul has had career ambitions, now mere fantasies because we can tell right away that his social clumsiness and laziness keep him from realizing his them. He’s just too comfortable in his routines, which have become a rut.
Cage is excellent as Paul, whose natural, hard-wired response is to UNDERREACT (the opposite of most of Cage’s movie roles). He suffers each of the oddities, then indignities, then outrages ,until they reach his breaking point.
The cast of Dream Scenario is deep and excellent:
- Julianne Richardson, as the wife who knows Paul best of anyone, for better and forworse, is stellar. Any actor who wants to learn the subtle slow burn should study Richardson’s reaction when one of her husband’s old girlfriends invites him for a coffee; Richardson lets us see her character’s building fury without a single stomp or eyeroll.
- Dylan Gelula has an unforgettable turn as a very young woman driven by a compulsion toward a paroxysm of passion that is destined to elude her – one of the funniest movie scenes this year, and one that she has perfectly set up in earlier scenes.
- Michael Cera is very funny as a hyper-opportunistic agency head, a paragon of insincerity.
- The always-excellent Dylan Baker is perfect as the Cool Kid in the college town’s social set.
- Tim Meadows is pitch-perfect as Paul’s longtime colleague/boss, who wants to dthe right thing, but can never cast side the bonds of an academic bureaucrat.
Dream Machine is one of the best comedies of the year, as funny and as smart as Barbie, which is high praise.