Searching for meaning

I'm not a Nicholas Cage fan. My favorite film of his is the one where he's drinking himself to death (Leaving Las Vegas.) The rest of his work is somewhere between competent (The Color Out of Space) and higher-end trash (Gone in 60 Seconds, etc.) So hearing Dream Scenario described in the trailer as "Nic Cage at his very best!" was not exactly a selling point for me, unless we were talking about something akin to LLV. Dream Scenario kinda gets there at points, but still not with enough tragedy or emotion to really hit that level. Or, in all honesty, to sell its own story in the first place.

Nominally, it's about Paul (Cage), underachieving science teacher (That's your cue Breaking Bad fans) who suddenly becomes a bystander in thousands (millions?) of people's dreams. Given the nature of our interconnected society, he instantly becomes famous when his story is released to the Interwebs, courtesy an old girlfriend looking for subject matter for her blog. Life begins to go awry from there, but we never really depart the stiflingly mundane life that Paul has built for himself and which he sees no route to proceed from except via his long-unwritten book. Paul is not an appealing character, lacking even the basic sympathy or mild wit that someone like Walter White exhibits in the beginning of his story. Instead, Paul's utter lack of ambition and inability to self-examine is used as a lever by which to portray the sudden rise of "normal" people to fame through modern social media and all of the downfalls that can accompany that status when your life is suddenly exposed to the attention of millions of people who would otherwise have ignored you. Paul, of course, is the most ignorable of people, appreciated by no one but the dean of his small college (Brett (Tim Meadows)) and his wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and then only reluctantly, it seems.

There's nothing to engender sympathy about Paul's situation, which is the usual approach in situations like this and perhaps that was writer-director, Kristoffer Borgli's, intent to escape that typical angle; a move that I would normally applaud, especially when trying to tell a story that delivers a message about modern circumstances. But the message ends up being muddled because we find ourselves why we're bothering to watch this at all given that, again, Paul is so uninteresting as to be basically repellent to not only everyone around him in the film, but those watching it, too. There's some interest generated by the phenomenon itself (Jung was right-!) and why it's only happening to Paul, but pretty soon that's kind of shuffled to the side in the interest of delivering the "deeper" message about fame and all of its foibles. There are, quiet honestly, better ways to go about this and with far more interesting characters to do it with. Do you really want your audience to reach the point of disdain for your main character by the end of the film without him having done one interesting thing the whole time? I could watch any reality TV trash for two hours and get the same result. Even the almost-but-not-quite sex scene, set up to be a flashpoint which predictably fizzles, doesn't engender anything in the viewer except a question as to why they're still sitting there watching this.

Suffice it to say that I didn't "get it." I mean, I understand the point that Borgli was trying to make and sympathize with the idea, but it didn't sell me at all. I basically felt nothing but contempt for everyone in the film, to one degree or another, and not just because the person onscreen most often is an actor that I don't particularly appreciate. Maybe you could take the time to watch this on some streaming service if you're interested in oneiromancy about the world as a whole, but I wouldn't blame you at all if you didn't bother.