Clicks and Giggles
Nicolas Cage puts another notch on his entertainingly unhinged performance belt as the year’s biggest nebbish.
Dream Scenario
Director: Kristoffer Borgli • Writer: Kristoffer Borgli
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Tim Meadows, Michael Cera, Dylan Gelula
USA • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong January 4 • IIB
Grade: B+
You know it had to happen. At some point there was going to be blowback on “kindness” and “respecting my trauma”, the same way there is always blowback on a social trend or movement that the olds don’t understand. To be fair, not getting the “kindness” movement has people across demographics confounded, so I guess it was to be expected. And trauma is no laughing matter, but there’s unfortunately a buzzword stigma attached to it now, and the very notion is being diluted by fools who think not getting a seat on the bus is a trauma – or better still invoke trauma on behalf of someone else. Sit down.
This murky space intersects with the fickle randomness of celebrity in Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, an absurdist comedy that wrestles with whims of social media fame, cancel culture, and how we collectively consume people, spit them out and move on at 5G speed cycles. When anonymous college professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) starts showing up in everyone’s dreams – literally everyone, everywhere, just standing there – his life takes a turn for the famous. He’s on morning TV, people high-five him on the street, his students are suddenly interested in what he’s teaching. It’s everything he’s ever dreamed of (rimshot, please). But when these dreams start turning into violent, threatening nightmares, Paul’s stardom – and Paul – turns toxic. Midsommar director Ari Aster is a producer here, and he knows a thing or two about awkward social interactions. Though the final act is a little willy nilly all over the place and Borgli doesn’t quite stick the landing, Dream Scenario is still a caustically amusing ride, and features the year’s most cringe-inducing love scene. Talk about traumatic.
In Dream Scenario, Cage – as grand and compelling as ever in one of his funniest performances – mixes Adaptation with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent in a distinctly Charlie Kaufman-esque film landscape. At times surreal and at others all too believable, Borgli refines the black comedy of his breakout film, Sick of Myself, with more elegant satire (the earlier film was a little more gruesome in its skewering of vanity and FOMO gone mad) and more focus on the content. Not total focus, but more.
Paul is one of those mediocre white men that feels he’s under-appreciated by his family and under-respected by his professional peers. He’s been trying to write a biology text about ant colonies for years, almost as long as he’s been bucking for an invitation to one of his colleague Richard’s (Dylan Baker) famously intellectual dinner parties. But the dreamwalking, which is brought to everyone’s attention by an old girlfriend and journalist, gives Paul a taste of the life he wishes he had, complete with “taking meetings” with a PR firm specialising in viral marketing run by Trent (Michael Cera) and Mary (Kate Berlant), and possibly a young side piece in the form of Trent’s assistant Molly (Dylan Gelula). This is where the cringe-inducing love scene comes into play. But of course, nothing lasts, and when things start to go south Brett (Tim Meadows), dean of the college Paul teaches – sorry, is tenured – at has no choice but to suspend him. Then shit really hits the fan.
Two of the ironcially-titled Dream Scenario’s greatest strengths are Cage in the lead (duh) and writer-director-editor Borgli’s unwillingness to talk down to his audience. In the case of the former, Cage is so effortlessly schlubby and desperate – the picture of nebbish – so flummoxed at the ultra-passive presence he seems to have in the dreams you totally get his increasing frustration. In the case of the latter, Borgli is obviously versed in click culture, for good and bad, but he wisely refrains from judgement. He accepts click-based celebrity for what it is and casts a dispassionate eye towards cancel culture righteousness. Where he keeps it interesting is in the dissection of the fallout sprinkled all around Paul. His wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson, I, Tonya) and daughters Sophie (Lily Bird) and Hannah (Jessica Clement) aren’t spared the ire of the public: Janet’s architecture career stalls because of it, and the less said about Sophie’s school play the better.
The ant colony metaphor that positions Paul as an unremarkable worker subject to the whims of the majority is well drawn, and cinematographer Ben Loeb (Panos Cosmatos’s Cage-starring Mandy) does wonders in making the previously warm and welcoming spaces over into cold and sinister ones as Paul pivots from passive to aggressive. On top of that Borgli’s decision to leave the dream phenomenon unexplained was the smart choice, one that adds a final surreal layer to the story when dreamwalking is reverse-engineered into something Noah Centineo, Nicholas Braun and Amber Midthunder can pitch as influencers. But there’s something just as awkward in Dream Scenario’s closing frames. You’ll leave knowing all the pieces of a razor sharp satire of clicklife are there, but you can’t quite figure out how they connect to eah other. It’s like you’ve woken from a dream that makes sense in flashes. Huh. Maybe that was the point. — DEK