By Jake Wilson
DREAM SCENARIO ★★★
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli
101 minutes, rated MA
In selected cinemas
After a long period of being treated as a joke, Nicolas Cage is back on top: he’s now a living legend who is licensed to clown around as much as he chooses (the same thing has happened to Hugh Grant, in a different way).
Nicolas Cage in Dream Scenario: his character starts turning up in other people’s dreams.Credit: a24
It’s a dangerous position for an actor to occupy, since it means you’re liable to be hired for who you are rather than what you could bring to a specific role. But Cage is still the main attraction of the lightweight magic-realist satire Dream Scenario – and his performance maintains a certain discipline, in that he never stoops to trying to make his character endearing.
At first glance, there’s not a great deal to like or dislike about Paul Matthews, a geeky biology professor at a middle American university whose dearest wish is to find a publisher for his magnum opus on ants, once he gets around to writing it.
This is the kind of loser role we’re used to seeing played by Paul Giamatti. But Cage’s version of social awkwardness is more alarmingly grotesque: Paul Matthews’ teeth are regularly bared in a would-be jovial grin, and his lumbering body language carries a hint of Frankenstein’s monster.
It’s still a reined-in performance by his standards, as it needs to be: the whole point about Paul is his blandness, the way he naturally fades into the background. This makes it all the more mysterious when a version of him starts showing up in the dreams of people he’s never met, for no reason anyone can fathom (“I’m special, I guess,” he theorises unconvincingly).
The dream version of Paul proves to be no less passive than his waking counterpart, seemingly restricted to looking on blankly at whatever bizarre situation is unfolding.
Nonetheless, these cameos are enough to turn him into one of the most recognisable faces on the planet – and for all his meekness he’s not indifferent to the advantages of his new status, including the attention he starts getting from women other than his wife (Julianne Nicholson).
Nicolas Cage captures every nuance in this most boring of personalities.Credit: a24
This could have been the starting point for something genuinely mind-bending, in the manner of sometime Cage collaborator Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation), whose scripts tend to reinvent their own premises every 20 minutes or so.
But Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli stays in one fairly narrow lane, mocking the flash-in-the-pan nature of viral fame and the narcissism associated with social media (his previous feature, last year’s Sick of Myself, involved a woman who deliberately contracts a disfiguring disease to get sympathy).
To say the least, these are not unfamiliar targets – and even when the tone darkens, the conception of Paul as a man without depth makes it hard to respond to the film as anything more than a series of sketches.
Still, the spectacle of Cage revelling in being boring is perversely entertaining in itself, especially in a lengthy set-piece where the newly celebrated Paul meets up with a couple of trendy marketers (Michael Cera and Kate Berlant), who insist on acclaiming him as “the most interesting man in the world”.
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