Dream Scenario Review

4 stars out of 5

Dream Scenario opens with flickering images as if the film itself is trying to recall a dream from last night.  We see glimpses of images then shots of black as if the memory can’t be fully retrieved. Then at once  the picture and sound are perfect. Perhaps the dreamer now has full recollection of the dream after  having tried to summon it. The dreamer is Paul Matthew’s (Nicholas Cage) daughter Sophie. She dreams  she and her father are in the back yard. She sits near a glass table and Paul is raking leaves near her.  Suddenly the glass top of the table breaks violently. A pair of keys with a gold frog keychain have fallen  from the sky and shattered the top. Sophie is incredulous. Paul watches but continues to rake. Then  more items fall, and eventually a body falls into the pool. Sophie starts to lift into the air. She panics. She  cries for her Dad but he just watches and continues to rake. After recounting the dream to her father  during breakfast, he is perturbed that she continues to have these dreams where he isn’t doing anything.  Just watching her. Paul wants it to be known that he would help her. He wouldn’t be a mere observer.  

Paul will soon discover that people all over the world have been dreaming about him. Students in his  zoology class whisper their dreams to each other trying to figure out what is happening. A colleague’s  wife can’t stop dreaming of Paul, much to the dismay of her husband Richard. At one of Richard’s  “famous” dinner parties, they relay this fact to their guests where one says she is also having nonstop  dreams of a man, and when they show her a photo of Paul, she is left speechless to see the man she is also obviously dreaming of. An ex-girlfriend of Paul’s happens to see him at a play and desires to get  coffee with him (much to the displeasure of Paul’s wife Janet). At the end of their coffee brunch, she  wants to write about her dreams on a blog. Her blog catches the eye of the local news, and after they do  an interview with Paul, the world now has a name to the face it has been dreaming of. Enter Paul’s new  found celebrity. 

Paul Matthews will go down as one of Cage’s best performances. It is always a delight to see Cage with  material worthy of his talent. He crafts a real Charlie Brown type of character at the age of 60, complete  with bald head and hair on the side. Everything about Paul seems to be average and inoffensive, if not  boring. His looks, humor, voice and possibly even his way of life. He has a conversation with Sheila, one  of his former grad students, in which he accuses her of stealing his idea of an ant hive mind. He thinks  she should credit him. She tells him he didn’t do any of the work, and she was a student of his thirty  years ago. He says he has a book, but when she presses him for information on his book, Paul admits he  hasn’t written it yet. Paul seems to be stagnant. Maybe too complacent in life. Maybe he has been a  mere observer of his life and this is what worries him about the dreams. That even in the fantasy, he is  relegated to mere observation. It’s hard to picture Paul in any fights. The former girlfriend that  recognizes Paul is shocked to learn that Paul had taken his wife’s last name when he married her. Paul is  fascinated with zebras and their ability to blend in, commenting a couple of times that when a zebra  distinguishes itself apart from the herd, it is now in danger of predators. He seems to believe it is better  to blend in.

Paul however finds himself liking the attention. His daughters now find him cool. They want him to drop  them off at school. His wife seems to be aroused by him knowing that other people are dreaming of her  husband. She even uses Paul’s new celebrity to get herself a desired position at her work. This might  even be the stepping stones to her affair. Her boss finding her more desirable because of her association  with Paul. Paul even decides to use his fame to get his book (still not written) published. This brings him  to Trent’s (Michael Cera) publishing company “Thoughts?”. Cera is great and puts a nice cap to the  phenomenal year he has had in 2023. Trent and his crew try to convince Paul to be a spokesperson for  Sprite and get people to dream about Sprite. Paul is aghast and only wants to publish his book on ants.  Trent says okay to the book because Paul is not only the trending topic, but is the most unique celebrity  ever, having touched the untapped dream market. Soon the meeting is over and Paul is conversing with  Trent’s secretary Molly because she seems to be having dreams of Paul that are wild. When he presses  Molly to tell him, she confides that her dreams start with him observing her from a dark corner of her  apartment near the kitchen (always a heavily symbolic area in film), but then escalate to him raping her.  She then wants to reenact this sequence with him, which culminates in a nominee for the most  embarrassing sexual experience put to film.  

Paul is angry with himself and his failure(s), That night, he can’t sleep, and everyone who has been  dreaming of him finds themselves having nightmares of Paul doing horrible things to them. Students find  that they can’t be near him in a classroom or even in a class with a mediator because their trauma is so  strong that they can’t cope. They are, however, able to graffiti his car and live stream his reaction while  they stand near him and taunt him. How deep is their trauma then? Can they antagonize him and not  feel scared, but also almost have panic attacks with 40 other victims and a mediator? Is dream trauma as  real as actual physical trauma? The university that Paul teaches at finds itself not only having to give  classes to help his students to cope with this trauma, but also having to refund tuition and put Paul on  leave.  

The cancel culture element of this film is fascinating, funny, nuanced and even taken from an original  angle. But maybe the more fascinating aspects of the film are its mentions of Bostrum and simulation  theory. Is all of this Paul’s dream? The opening and ending sequences might say yes, or it might just be  because we open and close on dreams. But why do people start dreaming of Paul? If it is all Paul’s  dream, it would explain how he became maybe the most famous person to ever live by doing nothing.  Why is it that Molly maybe has her sexual dreams where Paul is a more active persona and no one else  does? Is it because at that point of the film, he decides to be more ambitious and use his celebrity for a  publishing deal? His anger and the occurrence of nightmares after his encounter with Molly seem to  suggest that he has more control of the phenomena than he thinks he does, even if it is just  subconsciously, and his daughter bluntly accuses him of being able to control it. This feels like it is one of  those films that will be rewarding each time you watch it and are able to pull more layers off.