Rent Dream Scenario (2023)

Dream Scenario review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

If The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was the standard meta-postmodernist picture of Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario plays out like Charlie Kaufman's version of highlighting the actor’s surreal virality. For many years, Nic Cage has graced the internet as a slew of memes, ranging from jokes about his ridiculous hair in Knowing to his over-the-top performance in The Wicker Man remake. This film highlights that phenomenon and how it is beyond our control once our very identity becomes a viral sensation.

Cage plays the balding college professor Paul, a middle-aged guy struggling to achieve his decaying dreams. His book deal is going nowhere, and his class thinks little of him. Dreams seem to be The only interesting thing in his life. Not his dreams but the dreams of others. It starts with his daughter relaying a dream where an emotionless Paul watches his daughter float up into the sky in a surreal moment of horror. It’s a strange dream, but they don’t just run in the family. Several other people, including ex-girlfriends and students, start coming forward with dreams where Paul guest stars amid their deepest fears and attractions. Every dream is always the same. Paul is merely seen moseying around, sometimes in a state of disinterest. This wouldn’t seem unique in life, but the frequency of his appearance in dreams makes him a bizarre celebrity.

Paul attempts to take advantage of this newfound fame but doesn’t go how he wants. He meets with a marketing manager, Trent (Michael Cera), to help boost his chances of publishing his book, but all the young manager can think about is what products can be shoved into dreams. He later indulges in an affair with Trent’s assistant (Dylan Gelula), but it reaches an awkward conclusion. To complicate matters, Paul’s wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), is growing jealous of not being able to have these infamous dreams, further straining their marriage. It only gets worse when Paul’s dreams take a more terrifying twist when he appears to be killing the dreamers in their sleep (not in reality). Having gone from a friendly Freddy to a Freddy Krouger, Paul’s fame takes a nosedive, and he scrambles to salvage his lost 15 minutes of fame.

The weirdness of this premise mostly works for the first half of the film. Cage gives a great performance and is easily able to evoke the script’s dry humor from his casual dream cameos to his laughable moment of premature ejaculation. Only when the second half shifts into these uncontrollable dreams, which are a metaphor for cancel culture, does the narrative start to crack. While the idea of someone like Paul being reduced from getting a meeting with Obama to an interview with Joe Rogan, there is a level of uncontrollable chaos that doesn’t quite match the same downfall of figures like Jordan Peterson (which the film also mocks). Even less intriguing is the prospect of commodifying dreams that seem to come slamming out of the left field, wielding that capitalist satire with more of a wrecking ball than a hammer. By the end of the film, it feels like a messy mash of social media commentary by someone who doesn’t fully grasp how social media functions within our culture.

That said, Dream Scenario does have enough charm to make it mostly work. Cage never has a dull moment in this movie, and I’d be lying if I said some of these dreams didn’t make me laugh. As much as I didn’t like the film's second half, it did find a way to place some extra heart into the finale, as Paul reconnects with his wife in a dream that seems more genuine than a social media message. There are a lot of possibilities with a premise like Dream Scenario, and some of them are on the screen. The rest, however, is still stuck in the imagination of a script that needed a second draft to not seem like a makeshift Kaufman retread.