First impressions of Dream Scenario

No, Nicolas Cage is not "funnier than he's ever been." But he's really funny. And while everyone complains about the lackluster ending, let me praise what it does so well.

Diamond rings and all those things
They never sparkle like your smile
And as for fame, it’s just a name
That only satisfies you for a while…

You say you hunger
For something you can’t get at all
And love is not enough anymore…

If I was king for just one day
I would give it all away
I would give it all away
To be with you…

— Thompson Twins, “King for a Day”

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For a movie about the world’s most uninteresting man, surrounded by a supporting cast of even less interesting characters — yes, I realize that’s a contradiction, and nevertheless it’s true — Dream Scenario sure plays around with a lot of interesting ideas!

Dream Scenario, the A24 Flavor of the Month from writer and director Kristoffer Borgli, is a wise and witty satire about America’s cultural obsession with “going viral,” the fleeting and fragile nature of fame, and the cost of being a household name if the public turns against you. For starters.

This ultimately underwhelming psychological thriller follows a frustrated academic, Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage). Paul suffers from a sort of mediocrity that makes him a not-so-innocent bystander on the stage of life. He’s a ho-hum husband, an extremely uncool dad, a sort of “blank” in a world of exclamation points. His lack of agency doesn’t just make him uninteresting; it makes him annoying. He’d be lost if it weren’t for his longsuffering spouse Janet (Julianne Nicholson), who seems to still love him for who he is. Otherwise, Paul shuffles through every day yearning to be admired by his daughters, longing to be respected by his colleagues, and dreaming of being recognized for his studies on the psychology of ants. And he gets… wait for it… antsy when another academic infringes on what he considers his intellectual territory.

Professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) discovers that he’s gone viral — literally — by inexplicably appearing in everyone’s dreams. [Image from the A24 trailer.]

But it’s hard to be celebrated for one’s publications if one can’t find the will to sit down and start writing. And, like another character Nicolas Cage played in Charlie Kaufman’s provocative Adaptation, this avatar of Kaufman-esque insecurity and awkwardness just can’t bring himself to compose the pages that might finally put him on the Map of the World’s Somebodies.

In my creative writing classes, we always get around to talking about “the Story Spine,” an elementary formula that can be identified in anything we recognize as a story. There’s the situation: the “Once Upon a Time…” line. There’s the normalcy: the “Every day….” line. And then comes that most important moment, the thing we call the Inciting Incident. It’s the line that says, “But one day….”

The Inciting Incident of Dream Scenario, the big idea that sets the primary drama in motion, is this: Inexplicably, Paul starts appearing in everyone’s dreams. Everyone’s. His face is the face of an enigmatic dream epidemic. And he’s catapulted to global fame almost overnight. Fame for doing… nothing. He’s just suddenly everywhere.