Despite the startling makeover, it’s difficult to imagine anyone except Nicolas Cage playing Paul Matthews, the suffering and insufferable protagonist of Kristoffer Borgli’s black comedy. No other actor has shown the capacity to laugh not only at himself but also the men he plays in such a relentless fashion, and in Matthews’ case this capability is invaluable. A tenured professor of evolutionary biology who loves his work but seems to have pretty much cruised through his career, Matthews has serious self-esteem problems exacerbated by others’ disregard for his talents, a situation to which he is acutely sensitive. He thus makes that situation worse by constantly suggesting to the people he deals with that he demands attention he probably doesn’t deserve, or, at least, not as much as he thinks he deserves. This fairly complex set of traits is conveyed early on in Matthews’ approach to his family—wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson), an academic herself, and teen daughters Sophie (Lily Bird) and Hannah (Jessica Clement)—who barely tolerate his lack of self-awareness, and students, who mostly ignore him. However, once Matthews starts showing up in people’s dreams, even people he doesn’t know, he gets the attention he craves, though he has absolutely no idea how to handle it and, in the end, only makes matters worse for himself, because that’s the kind of person he is. He becomes a negatively charged celebrity, which sort of describes Cage himself after the turn of the millennium. 

Borgli doesn’t even attempt to explain how such a phenomenon can happen, which may be for the best, and in that regard there’s a strong sense of an overriding presence playing a cruel joke on Matthews. At first, his involvement in people’s nocturnal stories is benign to the point of banality: The dreamer is undergoing a crisis of some sort and Matthews just ambles by without offering any help. Soon Matthews is being interviewed by TV news shows and invited by an internet marketing firm to try and help it promote brand products in people’s dreams, an offer that at first offends Matthews, who was hoping that his fame might help him get closer to something he really wants, namely, a publishing deal for an as-yet unwritten book about ants. It adds enormously to the movie’s withering cynicism that most of the people Matthews comes in contact with are selfish and mean in the liberal fashion, and eventually Borgli drops the other shoe. Matthews’ dream cameos become more proactive in that he turns violent and destructive. People no longer want him around because he reminds them of something sick and evil, when, of course, he is not those things because he has no control over how people dream; though, in a sense, you can’t really blame those who are now banishing him from society, including his students, colleagues, and family. Matthews has always been a pathetic person, and now everybody is holding it against him.

Though Borgli’s wince-inducing humor is consistently applied and the movie’s riff on inadequacy highly effective, there is such a thing as having too much high concept. Charlie Kauffman comes to mind—and Cage’s dual performance in Adaptation, which Kauffman wrote, is probably his greatest—but Borgli doesn’t display any of Kauffman’s storytelling subtleties. When gratuitous insults are added to injuries no human should have to put up with, regardless of what an asshole the victim is, the jokes in Dream Scenario become unfunny and just getting to the end is an exhausting task. Even the mighty Nicolas Cage can’t redeem Paul Matthews’ miseries, which turn monumental. He’s a putz and nothing more. 

Opens Nov. 22 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Dream Scenario home page in Japanese

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