DREAM SCENARIO ★★★
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli
101 minutes, rated MA
In chosen cinemas
After a protracted interval of being handled as a joke, Nicolas Cage is again on prime: he’s now a residing legend who’s licensed to clown round as a lot as he chooses (the identical factor has occurred to Hugh Grant, another way).
Nicolas Cage in Dream Situation: his character begins turning up in different folks’s desires.Credit score: a24
It’s a harmful place for an actor to occupy, because it means you’re liable to be employed for who you’re quite than what you possibly can carry to a selected function. However Cage continues to be the primary attraction of the light-weight magic-realist satire Dream Situation – and his efficiency maintains a sure self-discipline, in that he by no means stoops to making an attempt to make his character endearing.
At first look, there’s not an incredible deal to love or dislike about Paul Matthews, a geeky biology professor at a center American college whose dearest want is to discover a writer for his magnum opus on ants, as soon as he will get round to writing it.
That is the form of loser function we’re used to seeing performed by Paul Giamatti. However Cage’s model of social awkwardness is extra alarmingly grotesque: Paul Matthews’ enamel are recurrently bared in a would-be jovial grin, and his lumbering physique language carries a touch of Frankenstein’s monster.
It’s nonetheless a reined-in efficiency by his requirements, because it must be: the entire level about Paul is his blandness, the way in which he naturally fades into the background. This makes it all of the extra mysterious when a model of him begins displaying up within the desires of individuals he’s by no means met, for no cause anybody can fathom (“I’m particular, I suppose,” he theorises unconvincingly).
The dream model of Paul proves to be no much less passive than his waking counterpart, seemingly restricted to trying on blankly at no matter weird state of affairs is unfolding.
Nonetheless, these cameos are sufficient to show him into one of the vital recognisable faces on the planet – and for all his meekness he’s not detached to the benefits of his new standing, together with the eye he begins getting from girls apart from his spouse (Julianne Nicholson).