Director: Kristoffer Borgli (USA). Year of Release: 2023
A good-sized garden, with its own swimming pool. A middle aged man is raking leaves by the pool. A younger woman, maybe his daughter, is lying on a sun lounger nearby. Suddenly, the glass table next to her explodes, the victim of a key chain which has fallen from the sky. Then a single shoe plummets into the swimming pool. This is followed by a human body. As the young woman starts to levitate, the man carries on raking leaves, and doesn’t react to any of the mayhem.
Paul is a University lecturer, who gives mildly interesting lectures to a diminishing class of bored students. We witness him telling them about a zebra’s stripes – how they offer no real camouflage, but make them look exactly like the rest of the herd, so that when a predator strikes, it is much more likely to rip apart one of the others. Paul has some ambitions – he would like to get a book published, for example – but has never quite got round to putting the words on paper.
Paul turns up to a restaurant, where he’s due for an evening out with his wife Janet. The waitress takes an age to deal with him as she’s sure she’s seen him somewhere. Shortly afterwards, after they go to the theatre, he bumps into an ex who says that she’s been dreaming about him. Others at the University report similar experiences. The problem is, in all of the dreams, Paul plays no active role. He just stands in the background and watches events just happen.
Gradually, Paul becomes a media phenomenon. At first, he welcomes the fame, as it may provide a platform to sell his book – the book he has never actually written. Early scenes see Paul frustrated with former acquaintances and lovers who have written best-selling works which are arguably based on ideas which Paul has shared with them. The difference is, while Paul has just indolently sat back, they have actually done something with their lives.
Paul’s new media fame encourages him to finally try to be a little proactive. He books a meeting with the PR agency Thoughts? who are just as insufferable as you might imagine. They suggest an ad spot for Sprite which will hopefully enter people’s dreams. When Paul intimates that this may be a little too down market for him, they raise the idea of doing something with Obama. Paul is not averse to selling his soul, just as long as his reputation does not suffer.
At Thoughts? Paul meets an intern, Molly, who concedes that she has been having erotic dreams about him and may be interested in reproducing them. At first, Paul protests that he is a married man, but he eventually concedes … with acceptably embarrassingly results. For reasons which don’t really make coherent sense, from now on, all dreams of Paul no longer have him standing back passively. Instead, he is violently attacking the dreamer.
First the good news. Nicolas Cage does not overact. Now this may not sound remarkable to anyone who has never seen a Nicolas Cage film, but his restrained performance as an “inadequate loser,” an average Joe uninteresting guy, shows more artistic chops than pretty much any of Cage’s scenery chomping over the past few decades. Furthermore, the film is well-paced, the acting is good, and the dialogue is, if not always believable, then at least, under the circumstances, plausible.
The problems come when we start to think about what the film is actually trying to say. Cancel Culture is namedropped on more than one occasion, but this has become a phrase used to mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean. Student activists protesting fascists and transphobes being paid to speak on Campus? That’s Cancel Culture. But so is the media campaign denouncing supporters of Palestine as antisemites. Cancel culture can punch both up and down.
Dream Scenario is a good liberal film. It punches sideways. It makes disapproving tuts at the idea of autonomous spaces or the idea that traumatized kids should not be forced to re-experience their trauma. While it doesn’t explicitly say this is political correctness gone mad, it mouths the words. But when the far right try to appropriate Paul as one of their own, he – and by association the film – looks horrified. But it is this refusal to address issues or take a side which blunts the film’s satire.
Paul’s dilemma is the result of something which does not – which could not – happen. Yes, I know, so did Being John Malkovich, but Dream Scenario is a film more desperate to make a point. The problem is that this message is little more than: “will no-one think of the tenured academics?” Or, as another critic put it more sharply: “won’t someone think of the trauma men are going through now that women have stopped pretending we don’t have good reasons to be afraid of some of you?”
Another message is that Influencers are superficial know-nothings with too much power. Well, thanks for telling us that. We’d never have known otherwise. You get the feeling that the film is just picking on easy targets for cheap satire. Above all, you get the feeling that the well-off Men are now muscling in on legitimate female worries of exclusion. Stop moaning, ladies. You don’t know how hard it is to be a balding academic.
Dream Scenario is not uninteresting. It is a film which at least approaches some interesting discussions, even if its inherent conservatism means that it is unable to deal with these discussions with the seriousness that they deserve. But the mere fact that it is prepared to escape the usual Hollywood blinkers and to even contemplate halfway interesting ideas means that this is not your normal Nic Cage film. It’s nothing special, and has obvious faults, but it’s an ok watch.
I’m not sure if this is enough, but at least it’s something.
CinePhil 