‘Everything is trauma. Arguing with a friend is trauma. Getting bad grades is trauma. They need to grow up…’
Nic Cage is so famous and so beloved now that he could live out his time for the rest of his career just being a meme and playing a parody of himself until the day he inevitably drops dead on set. And I would have fully supported that. While Cage’s late-era renaissance has encompassed an element of self-parody, culminating in the meta-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, occasionally he will pull out a performance like the one he delivers here, and it reminds you just how good an actor he is…
Paul Matthews (Cage) is an aggressively unremarkable college professor. He’s happily married to his endlessly understanding wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson). He has aspirations to publish a book one day. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, he starts appearing in everyone’s dreams. Often, he just stands and watches as the dreamer battles some kind of mortal or existential threat, other times he is an active participant. Eventually, people start to recognise Paul out in the wild leading to book deals, television appearances and a whole load of weird encounters.
Despite the outlandish premise, Cage delivers a subtle and downbeat performance here, perhaps similar to his turn in Gore Verbinski’s underrated dark comedy The Weather Man. Paul Matthews veers wildly from sympathetic to sneering to pathetic from scene to scene, and it is only Cage’s flagrant humanity that ensures that Matthews feels like an authentic, lived-in character throughout. The dream sequences allow writer-director Kristoffer Borgli to flex his muscles in his English language debut feature and his assured handling of the material has marked the Norwegian director out as one to watch in the future.
Unlike many other high-concept films. Dream Scenario is more than just an elevator pitch. This is a movie of substance, of big ideas. And while we don’t get much of Cage screaming into the void (although we do get some, he really cannot help himself), this is one of his more accomplished late-career performances.
