Chicago International Film Festival 2023 Review: Dream Scenario
An outside perspective is a funny thing. It’s certainly key to the wickedly insightful Chicago International Film Festival film “Dream Scenario,” which takes the familiar figure of the embattled upper middle class everyman to darkly satirical ends.
Unfamiliar territory? Of course not, but writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s Norwegian background works wonders to make one of the most familiar routes in indie film feel exciting, even fresh. And it’s difficult to imagine a more perfect actor to encroach upon American normalcy than Nicolas Cage, who’s always had the ability to to bring audiences along with whatever artistic phase he happens to be into at the moment, memes and all.
Borgli takes such pains to establish normalcy that Cage’s Paul seems too much of a walking cliche to tread anything approaching originality. He’s successful in an inadequate college professor way, hasn’t even started the book he’s always meant to write, he has well-adjusted, appropriately safeguarded daughters, and he even took his loving wife Janet’s (Julianne Nicholson) last name.
When Paul somehow starts showing up in people’s dreams, this average, supposedly progressive man quickly reveals his capacity for darkness. Paul’s newfound fame and viral state are at first seductive in the way fame and its modern manifestations generally are: people pay attention to him and express an interest in what he has to say, he’s invited to speak his mind on major outlets, and is applauded for merely walking into a room.
But the uglier side of notoriety must manifest eventually, and this phenomenon likewise darkens as Paul leans into his worst instincts. Suddenly he’s not merely strolling into dreams, he’s violently rampaging through them, committing horrific acts that have people terrified at the very sight of him and the consequences reverberating throughout his life to the point that he’s asked to leave a restaurant and take a break from his classes, with crowds of strangers expressing their general disdain for him, and his wife and daughters also suffering workwise and socially.
In another film, this would be the opportunity to criticize so-called cancel culture, a route so painfully obvious it gets a verbal mention. Credit Borgli’s darkly penetrating gallows humor to avoid American notions of the unjustly persecuted self-made man and zero in on how that man always places his own (if very real) suffering above those he’s harming. That his pain is due to actions which are completely unintentional on his part and likely beyond his control is not allowed to become the entirety of the story, especially when the ends are so traumatic for his victims.
As Borgli himself put it at the Q&A shortly after, “Life is beautiful from the right angle.” And it truly can be so, even if cutthroat global capitalism once again shows its avarice by milking profit out of every kind of phenomenon. We may learn our lessons too late, but thankfully Borgli never allows his commentary on social media, masculinity, and modern celebrity to obscure the fact that our dreams can always potentially contain the sort of magic that can’t always be a part of our waking life.
Grade: A-
