OK, so do we think Nicolas Cage is a brilliant actor who doesn’t get the credit he deserves or is he an overrated hack who only made it in Hollywood because of his nepo baby bonafides? I’m not sure a middle ground exists, as everyone I talk to falls in one camp or another, some not even willing to watch a movie with him anywhere in the periphery.
I’m firmly in the first camp: fully in awe of his “Nouveau Shamanic/German Expressionist” style of acting and always willing to go on whatever journey he’s willing to take me on (because no one is going farther out into the reaches of the craft than he is).
The problem with Nic Cage isn’t that he’s a good actor or a bad one; it’s that the man loved to spend money and became so underwater with bills, dinosaur skulls, the haunted mansion he bought in New Orleans and the castle in Germany, that he started saying yes to every film he was offered. This led to a run from around 2012 to 2020 where he made dozens of Video-on-Demand movies that ranged from forgettable (“The Frozen Ground,” “Arsenal”) to downright embarrassing (“Left Behind,” “The Humanity Bureau,” “Between Worlds). But even then, Cage knocked a few performances out of the park (“Joe,” “Mandy,” “Color Out of Space.”)
It was with 2021’s masterpiece ,”Pig,” that things shifted again for Cage, firmly placing him back on the A-list with a performance that toned down his “mega-acting” and showed how deeply he could delve internally for a performance instead of creating a bunch of batshit mannerisms. He hasn’t quite capitalized on the goodwill from that performance yet and still wears the tarnish of his years as a heavily meme’d joke, but even as he hasn’t been given a project as beautiful as “Pig,” he’s still putting in the work with every single new role.
His newest is “Dream Scenario,” a film that has an amazing premise, a multi-faceted central performance from Cage and some genuinely big ideas, but is let down by the filmmaker’s lack of interest in following those ideas into new and interesting territories. Cage plays Paul Matthews, a schlubby college biology professor who is widely considered by his peers and students to be boring and forgettable. He’s unhappy as just a teacher and would prefer to publish a scientific book on ants, but feels like his best ideas have been stolen by others. He’s bitter, petty and not very likable. Around this time, hundreds of people around the country start having dreams about him where he is very passively watching things happen to the dreamers.
This makes him a viral sensation, with more people attending his lectures and showing interest in him than ever before. But when everyone’s dreams start turning into nightmares with Paul as the central boogeyman, his fame quickly turns into infamy and he finds himself canceled not just by society, but by the people who know him.
So, what we have with “Dream Scenario” is part toothless satire about cancel culture, part high-concept thriller about the shared subconscious of humanity, part comedy focused on a nebbish and mediocre white man trying and failing to rise above his station and part social commentary about the danger of groupthink and the evils of consumerism. The problem is that the film never follows a single one of these paths to conclusion we haven’t seen dozens of times before. Instead, it brings the viewer into a story filled with fascinating ideas and a wonderful central performance from Cage, but then hits them over the head with a cartoonish acme brick of ideas in the finale that fail to pay off any of the threads that made the film original and interesting.
That’s the thing: Paul Matthews sucks. As a human, as a teacher, as a father and as a husband. So, when the movie stops focusing on the ideas of why he’s in people’s dreams or what that would mean for humanity and turns inward to focus on his crumbling marriage, we’re not remotely invested. We pity Paul. We feel sorry for his put-upon family and the unfair situation all of them are in, but Paul continually makes the wrong decision at every fork in the road at everyone else’s expense. He’s Walter White without steel in his spine.
“Dream Scenario” is still entertaining to watch and gives you some interesting thought experiments to chew on, but is also buried under the weight of all its missed opportunities. Filmmakers like Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze have explored the human cost of big ideas with more success in films like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich.” “Dream Scenario” wishes it held a candle to those classics.
“Dream Scenario” didn’t need to be better than those movies, but it should have found a way to marry the human element of the story with the trippy sci-fi ideas. The romance between Clementine and Joel is the heart of “Eternal Sunshine,” not the concept of memory erasure. As wonderful as it is to see Cage fully invested in a performance again, he isn’t given a solid foundation to work from because pity can’t be the central emotion a lead character elicits from their audience.
We needed to root for Paul and his dream to publish a book about ants instead of basking in the schadenfreude of his failures. Instead, even as Cage swings for the fences, we’re left wondering why we care. He does so much of the heavy lifting here that I was once again reminded why he’s a movie star. Cage alllllmost makes us root for Paul just purely based on his inherent Nic-charisma. Cage-risma? Either way… he deserves better.
This article appears in Source Weekly December 21, 2023.
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