In a career chockablock with head cases, weirdoes, volatile inscrutables, cracked-mirror self-parodies, and other assorted voyagers along the far reaches of human behavior, the surrealist black comedy Dream Scenario deals Nicolas Cage the last challenge he has yet to conquer: portraying the most normal man in the world.
People generally look right through latter-day mister cellophane Paul Matthews, a professor of zoology losing the war for his undergrads’ attention with corny jokes and geeky enthusiasm for the evolutionary marvel of zebra stripes. At home, his daughters occasionally acknowledge his existence without looking up from their phones, and his wife (Julianne Nicholson, in her second role of the year as a woman named Janet consistently disappointed by the deficiencies of the opposite sex) affectionately teases him for his awkward verbosity. There’s nothing remarkable about this garden-variety schlemiel – until, following the approximate trajectory of James Corden, he starts to make inexplicable cameos in the brains of perfect strangers and learns how rapidly celebrity can harden into public contempt.
At first, he just lurks on the periphery and saunters through thousands of dreams across the globe, for which he becomes one of those overnight meme personalities famous for being famous. Mild-mannered and shy, Paul has little desire to stoke his growing profile until he realizes it could help his to-be-written book on insect psychology (ant-elligence, as he’s coined it) get off the ground, and attempts to reroute his notability toward unrelated success. He’s headed for the milkshake-ducking of the century, and along the way, the academic will receive a humiliating lesson on the fickle vicissitudes of stardom as well as the indignities required to sustain it. Too well-schooled in the social physics of the internet to come off as a scold against it, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli dexterously skewers a callous culture that cultivates, digests, and disposes of its novelty acts with the blazing-fast speed of a good WiFi connection.
Ari Aster’s participation as producer makes the comparison to Beau Is Afraid, a parallel trail of tribulation for a dumpy guy at the mercy of a universe that won’t stop picking on him, before a critic gets the chance to. Though that frees us up to instead point to Election, which shares the steady, clinical diagnosis of the way ego makes over sad-sack beta males into arrogant lechers. Paul leaves a meeting with some soulless ad-agency staffers (Michael Cera and Kate Berlant, their brand of ha-ha funny a welcome complement to the smirky cringe comedy) feeling mostly disgusted with their pitch to use his ability to shill for Sprite, though an assistant (Dylan Gelula) catches his eye by confessing that he does much more than stand there in her dreams. Their excruciatingly uncomfortable encounter later that night taunts Paul with his inability to enjoy the spoils of his windfall, then ends with the film’s broadest and most pathetic punch line.
As he feels himself slipping in relevance, his team of brand managers correctly posit that there’s always the backup plan of pivoting to the far right, a safe space where castoffs from the mainstream can hold fast to a smaller yet unshakable following. Following this pertinent bullseye, Borgli’s off-kilter parable loses some traction as it advances from the abstract concept of getting canceled – an eviction from living rent-free in everyone’s heads – to the actual phenomenon. To Paul’s annoyance and ultimately horror, he discovers that his decreasingly adoring fandom judges him based on their slumbering idea of him rather than his actions in the waking hours. We get shades of the unsavory thesis statement in Louis CK’s unreleased, unreleasable I Love You, Daddy that no one really knows anything about anyone, so they should just mind their own business. But Paul presents an equation not so readily solved; though he’s right when he complains that “trauma” is deployed as a get-out-of-anything-free card far too much these days, his venomous delivery makes him sound like an old crank.
Paul gets what’s coming to him, initially in a good way that rapidly turns to the bad way, just as his misfortunes due to forces beyond his control gradually become his own fault. Splitting the difference between tragedy and satire, Borgli takes this educated fool as a symptom of an ugliness in modern times, fitting from a film-maker whose last feature followed a woman rotting the skin off of her body for clout. Here, the deformities are those of character, a moral slippage that doubles as a warning softened by the ludicrous levities. No one can thrive when they’re living for exposure.
Dream Scenario is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released later this year
