Review: not a lucid Dream Scenario
Dream Scenario, a new dark comedy written and directed by Kristoffer Bogli, begins with a neat premise: an ordinary guy goes about his daily life until people start seeing him in their dreams. Not just once, but recurrently. And not just people who know him, but complete strangers.
The guy in question is named Paul (played by Nicholas Cage at his modulated and discomfiting best), a tenured professor of evolutionary biology who lives modestly with his wife, Janet (a one-note Julianne Nicholson), and two teenage daughters. In fact, it is his younger daughter who first recounts Paul’s presence in her nightly visions: regardless of what else is going on – levitation, shattering glass, objects falling from the sky – she says he merely stands by. Passive.
“You’re just… there,” she remembers.
Of course, this canny assessment applies to how Paul behaves in real life, too. Cowardly and circumspect, he shuffles along from one obligation to another – imploring his children to put their phones away, or scolding his students for talking in class. When he learns that a former colleague is publishing a book derived from a thesis that he’s been sitting on for thirty years, Paul is enraged. He calls her a “cheat,” and pleads with her for some credit.
All in all, he is a pathetic person – hungry for recognition, yet reluctant to put in the work so that he might actually attain it. But then people start dreaming of him, and everything changes.
On the surface, Dream Scenario is a satire, or a commentary on the fickle nature of modern celebrity. But what exactly is the point being made? Who or what is being sent up? Ostensibly, Mr. Bogli builds his movie around several allusions to herds; specifically, in a central metaphor, Paul teaches his students about the evolutionarily beneficial stripes on zebras. You see, when they stand together, zebras become indecipherable to predators. But if one zebra stands apart from its herd, it very quickly turns into a target.
This is certainly true for Paul, whose newfound fame places him, an otherwise nondescript man, on everyone’s radar. At first, there are a few downsides (e.g. when a strange man threatens to kill him), but his ubiquity brings a lot of perks, too: Janet leverages her marriage to snag a prestigious job; Paul’s elusive, fancy friends start inviting him to parties; and he’s courted by a marketing company (led by a pitch-perfect Michael Cera) that wants him to become the new face of Sprite.
But blending in is tantamount to safety, and when what seems like a dream scenario abruptly turns nightmarish – that is, when people start encountering far more violent versions of Paul in their sleep – he becomes a social outcast. A pariah. Canceled, if you will.
It’s at this turn in the narrative that Bogli’s pet zebra analogy starts to lose coherence. Because, to continue the metaphor, Paul isn’t attacked by a lion; rather, he’s attacked by other zebras. Younger zebras.
Once the nightmares begin, Paul’s primary persecutors are his students: teens and twenty-somethings (Gen Z-bras?) who can’t stand the sight of their professor because they find him “triggering.” “Everything is trauma nowadays,” Paul complains. “I didn’t do anything to them!” Though in the latter regard, Paul is entirely right, and though the students’ intolerance is objectively foolish, it feels like the movie uses young people as a moral scapegoat – equating generational sensitivity to abusive behavior with illogic. (Or, if you please, herd mentality.)
There’s an apologist flavor to a movie that rushes to the defense of a trod-upon, entitled white man, and Dream Scenario betrays a lurking paranoia towards cancel culture.
Ultimately, I suspect it’s this confused metaphor, and Mr. Bogli’s devotion to it, that robs the premise of its potential strength. Though it flirts with hot-button cultural topics, Dream Scenario never arrives at a satisfying conclusion – and I would argue that is largely because it defers to Cage’s character. It would’ve been a far more electrifying, nerve-wracking movie if Paul wasn’t the protagonist, yet remained the affected party.
If all the action stayed the same, but we only ever saw Paul through the eyes of students, he’d come across as far more insidious. Far more ambiguous.
What’s more, if he’d centered the students’ perspectives, Bogli might’ve analyzed a couple different nuances behind Gen Z as a cultural force: on the one hand, the kids make Paul a celebrity, but on the other hand, their conflicted ways of interacting with sensational “content” (i.e. dreams) get in the way of their remembering that he’s a person. Equally, Paul represents the generational oppression that folks born at the turn of this century can identify in their own lives; he’s a stand-in for a world of fathers and community leaders who haven’t technically done anything bad to them, yet whose mere existence – whose lifelong acquiescence in the face of a deteriorating planet – is a betrayal or assault on their well-being.
Clearly, there’s a lot to work with here, and it’s to Mr. Bogli’s discredit that he doesn’t galvanize himself into making better use of his premise. Cage seems to be a magnet for projects like these: half-baked meta comedies that pit a man of tawdry repute against surreal circumstances. In the last year alone, he’s done, among other things, Renfield and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. All these movies strike me as opportunistic endeavors by well-positioned, humorless filmmakers; they all laugh at their own cynical outlook, at their own audacity for giving Nicholas Cage something else to do.
There is a smug hollowness to movies like Dream Scenario that turns me off in a big way. So much of a story’s power rests in who is telling it, or how it’s told. In this case, the venture ends up resembling a pity party for a loser of a guy, so resentful of rejection that it makes me want to reject it all the more. Mr. Bogli has the right idea, he just doesn’t know how to interpret it.
