The Media Tourist

Nicolas Cage is at his Cage-iest in twisty tale of dreams run amok

Dream Scenario
Starring Nicolas Cage
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Dec. 1

Sigmund Freud said that dreams are “the most profound when they seem the most crazy.” The late, great psychoanalyst has been gone for some 90 years, but I suspect he might have some thoughts, if he were still around, about Nicolas Cage popping up in other people’s snoozy noggins.

Cage’s character in Dream Scenario, a rumpled college biology professor “nobody” named Paul Matthews, is as surprised as everyone else when he finds out people—thousands of them—have been seeing him in their dreams. He always appears as a benign figure passing through, not speaking or doing much of anything; it’s like he’s photo-bombing their nocturnal Instagram feeds. As reports of his invasive dreams make news, he becomes a media sensation and goes viral on the internet. Nobody knows why it’s happening, but suddenly, the whole world knows about Paul, and he likes it.

“So, I’m finally cool?” he asks his two teenage daughters. “I wouldn’t go that far,” his oldest tells him.

The movie drops in a lot of ideas—astral projection, the Mandela Effect, a collective subconscious, dream travel—as everyone tries to figure out what’s going on. Does it have anything to with Paul’s scholarly interest in the complex “herd mentality” of ants, or the way zebras visually meld into larger groups as an adaptive survival strategy? Where does the art-rock band Talking Heads, and David Byrne’s big, oversized suit, fit in? Can Paul capitalize on his newfound celebrity status as “the most interesting man in the world”?  

Things take a turn for the worse when his presence in dreams abruptly becomes more involved, much darker and far more troubling. One young woman (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Dylan Gelulla) wants Paul to reenact in person her recurring erotic dreams in which he seduces her. Other people have nightmares, with Paul appearing as a menacing, stalking, traumatizing figure. Even he begins have nightmares in which he’s terrorized by…himself. His students think he’s a monster; one of his daughters tells him her friends “call you Freddy Krueger.”

With his world crumbling around him, Paul goes on the defensive about his dream double appearing in everyone’s nocturnal reveries. “That man,”, he says emphatically in an online video, “is not me!”

Crazy, right? It gets even crazier when a tech company invents a gizmo, based on Paul’s “dream epidemic,” that lets users control which dreams they want to “visit,” and what messages—or products—they want to plug in dreamers’ minds. (And it comes with a “no nightmare guarantee.”) As Paul navigates the darker flip side of his short-lived fame, he becomes an almost tragic figure, a victim of something he can’t and couldn’t control, something he doesn’t understand. 

It’s a dark comedy, but it has flourishes of horror and sci-fi, like an edgier Twilight Zone or an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror. (One of the producers is Ari Aster, who directed the unsettling mind-benders Midsommer, Hereditary and Beau is Afraid.) Cage’s Paul Matthews fits in snugly with the impressively broad range of other “unconventional” characters the eclectic actor has played in “crazy” films like Adaptation, Pig, Ghost Rider, Renfield, The Wicker Man and Mandy.

But this crazy-train tale also tunnels into your head with some pointed, thought-provoking satire about the undesirable side effects of fame, the addictive nature of technology and the sublime mysteries of the mind, where ids and egos sometimes run free, or run amok. What are dreams? Are we responsible for them? What do our nocturnal wanderings say about us? Sigmund Freud might even have called Dream Scenario “profound.”

It’s just too bad he’s not around to see it. I’d sure like to hear what he’d have to say.

—Neil Pond

Two Oscar-winning actresses do a delicate dance around a dicey subject built on tabloid fodder

May December
Starring Natalie Portman & Julianne Moore
Directed by Todd Haynes
Rated R

In limited release Friday, Nov. 17; on Netflix Dec. 1

A Hollywood actress preps for a provocative, ripped-from-the-headlines role in this deliciously dark exploration of sexual manipulation, forbidden love, deep-dish obsession and the porous boundary between entertainment and reality. Taking its title from the shorthand phrase for a relationship with a wide age gap between partners, May December pairs two formidable Oscar-winning actresses in a delicate dance around a dicey subject: a scandalous liaison and the sexual exploitation of a child.

Natalie Portman stars as Elizabeth, a well-known TV actress who comes to the small Southern town of Savannah, Ga., to spend some time with the real woman she’ll be playing for “reel” in a movie about a decades-old chapter from her disreputable past. Julianne Moore is Gracie, a character closely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, the infamous schoolteacher who was sentenced to seven years in prison in the ‘90s for inappropriate sexual relations with one of her students, a 12-year-old boy that she pleaded guilty to raping when he was a sixth grader.

Like Letourneau, Gracie and her student/lover later married and started having children. He’s 36 years old now as we meet him as the movie opens, a dad with twins about to graduate from high school and another—born while Gracie was in the hoosekow—enrolled in college. Clearly Joe (in a solid, heart-wrenching performance by Charles Melton) is carrying the emotional baggage of a lost youth, an emotionally stunted man-child thrust into adulthood too soon. And unlike the Monarch butterflies he raises as a hobby, Joe can’t emerge from his confining, life-defining cocoon of fate with Gracie. There’s no way he can leave his past behind, spread his wings and just fly away from it all.

As Elizabeth researches her role, she tries to get inside Gracie’s head, to understand what makes her tick. Gracie, herself lost in her own cocooned concocted fantasy of a wholly consensual, misunderstood relationship, resents the intrusion of show biz, shining the glare of its spotlight into her life. And Joe is caught in the middle, where eventually a line is crossed and Elizabeth discovers that she and Gracie may not be that different, after all.

Director Haynes, a lauded filmmaker whose previous work includes Carol, Mildred Pearce, Dark Water and biopics on Bob Dylan and Cher, walks this precariously tense familial tightrope (there’s even a bar band doing a ragged rendition of Leon Russell’s song 1972 hit “Tight Rope”) with dollops of subversive humor, analogies for predators and prey, and scathing swipes at America’s apparently insatiable appetite for true-crime programming, boldly biting the Netflix hand that feeds his project. A scene in a dress shop, in which fitting-room mirrors resemble the myriad reflections in a carnival funhouse, suggests that fabrication and real experience have become nearly indistinguishable from each other, conveniently merged for our carnivorous consumerism, our entertainment and amusement.

Even though Moore tends to chew the scenery here and there, taking her performance over the top into meaty melodrama and campy cheese, she does convey the skewed reality of a woman who did the crime and did the time, but now spends her days refusing to confront any of it or the damage it caused. Portman is the audience’s surrogate, looking into a situation and trying to understand it, then being pulled deep into it.

Together, they pull you into this tawdry tale based on taboo fodder, elevating it in the process to something much more profound, and more unflinchingly honest.

—Neil Pond