Dream Scenario

 

Director Krystoffer Borgli

Borgli on the set with Nicolas Cage

Borgli directing a scene

DREAM SCENARIO            B-                                                                                                   USA  (102 mi)  2023  d: Krystoffer Borgli

When a nerdy evolutionary biology professor (a balding Nicolas Cage) suddenly starts appearing in the dreams of hundreds of thousands of people, he becomes an immediate media sensation, seemingly harmless at first, with marketing strategists crafting get rich quick schemes of how to take advantage of his massive recognition, but when things take a dark turn, as the dreams grow violently terrifying, that instant stardom turns sour, becoming the object of derision, where he is literally shunned by the same society that initially embraced him.  This is a cringeworthy satirical assessment of failed dreams, missed opportunities, and the devastating harm done by social media, where fame is equated to hysteria, as innocent people can easily be ostracized by false and fabricated accusations, where a herd mentality takes over with violent tendencies that blindly condemns anything out of the ordinary, as society has always embraced security through conformity, in this case leaving careers shattered and lives destroyed, paying little consequence for their bullying behavior, hiding behind the anonymity of their invisible lives, leaving behind a trail of reckless impulsiveness.  Reminiscent of a terrifying scene in Jacques Audiard’s 2021 #6 Film of the Year Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e) where a law student is mistaken for a porn star, with both male and female students openly demeaning her with cyber bullying and sexist taunts, forcing her to withdraw from school and alter her career, while also seemingly spawned from the wild imagination of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in Spike Jonze’s ADAPTATION (2002), where writer’s block turns into a screenwriter’s nightmare.  The common thread here is actor Nicolas Cage, known for choosing oddball roles played with a strange, over-the-top quirkiness, where his extended range is allowed to shine in this film where he can be completely unfiltered, bringing an eccentric intensity into the role, from a mousy nobody to an unhinged maniac, appearing in ADAPTATION twenty years ago in perhaps the greatest performance of his career, utterly brilliant in a dual role as rival sibling screenwriters, earning an Oscar nomination, with this film feeling like an extension of that role, kind of an absurdist and often surreal writer’s fantasy written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli in his English language debut. Shot on 16mm film, giving this an intentionally grainy texture, using distorted sound and abrupt cuts that continually keep viewers off-balance, the film creates its own visual language.  

The sheer audacity of the film is at times hilarious, taking us down a dark turn we’ve never taken before, yet what stands out is the utter cluelessness of Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), a tenured professor with aspirations of publishing a book on the Swarm intelligence of ants, not exactly in everyone’s wheelhouse, but in his delusional and self-obsessed mind it’s something people should be interested in, where a driving force may be to pull him out of the obscurity of anonymity, resentful of his lack of notoriety, as he hungers for validation.  While it’s been decades since his research in grad school, he still hasn’t published or even started writing anything.  He leads a banal yet comfortable life with his architect wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and two teenage daughters, Hannah (Jessica Clement) and Sophie (Lily Bird), with the film opening with Sophie reluctantly floating into the air screaming for her Dad to help while he passively looks on, remaining conspicuously unconcerned, never showing any interest in his daughter’s anxiety.  But it’s all a dream.  Nonetheless, Paul grows defensive, baffled and embarrassed at having to explain his lethargic behavior in the dream to his daughter, trying to convince her this would never happen in real life.  However, Paul is not a man of action, and may as well be invisible, as he’s the kind of guy people pass by on the street without giving him a second thought.  For most people he simply doesn’t exist, forever lurking in the background.  Even in his classroom, he’s largely ignored by students who are only there because it’s required, and are otherwise bored by his teaching methods, which generate no spark of interest.  So when he starts appearing in their dreams, finding himself in the fantasies and nightmares of strangers, mostly as a non-intrusive bystander who simply happens to show up, watching the most horrible things happening to people without helping, he is there, but just stands around, useless and impervious to what’s happening to them.  It wouldn’t really amount to much except their friends and other people they know also have the same kinds of dreams, where he always appears as a passively inert figure who just happens to be there, as if taking a wrong turn somewhere.  To the film’s credit, they never offer any explanation for this astounding development, yet somehow it feels connected with just how unlikable Paul is in the eyes of others, perhaps a manifestation of his own subconscious feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy, becoming a hideous example of his own crippling insecurities.  

Social media is what connects all these people together, as they’re surprised to discover the same man is appearing in all their dreams, becoming an instant celebrity, talked about on television reports, where Paul’s photograph becomes a viral Internet meme shared by people around the world, showering him with the attention he has long sought after, where it goes to his head, thinking he’s somehow responsible for this phenomenon, literally bathing in the limelight.  “So, then I’m finally cool,” he says to his daughter, hoping it will draw attention to selling his book.  He’s not alone, as others also try to capitalize on the moment, including an enterprising new-age PR firm called Thoughts? headed by CEO Trent (Michael Cera, always appearing in a baseball cap) and his associate Mary (Kate Berlant), suggesting Paul could enter a dream holding an advertised product, or have Obama dream about him, thinking they could rake in the money, literally naming their own price, as Paul is the hottest thing on the market, with Trent describing him as “the most interesting person in the world.”  But the film veers off on another tangent when Trent’s attractive assistant Molly (Dylan Gelula) takes Paul aside and expresses a personal interest in spending some time with him, as in her dream Paul was an active participant in a sex fantasy, which catches him a bit off guard, as he was never active in another person’s dream before.  This goes about how you might expect, as Molly is thrilled by the idea, but Paul fails to live up to what she imagines.  It’s an unsettling experience causing humiliation and shame, yet it’s played for laughs, where the experience alters the entire tone of the picture, knocking him off his pedestal, suddenly becoming angry and testy with people, as he can’t control what is happening in their dreams.  The subtle shift turns nightmarish, becoming disturbing and alarming, as Paul’s benign passivity in dreams grows more menacing, turning into a grotesque Freddy Krueger figure, where his instant stardom quickly fades, and people turn on him with a vengeance, becoming more aggressively vicious, hounding him wherever he goes, spray painting “Loser” on his car, where the entire world loathes what he’s become.  They no longer want to have anything to do with him, including his own family, who reject him, tragically losing his job in the process, spiraling into a pathetic netherworld of exile and ostracization.  The flip-flop into horror loses the acidic bite of satire, resembling something else altogether, yet the cruelty on display is staggering, mirroring what can happen when social media turns toxic and runs amok, leaving a hollow emptiness where reality used to be, creating a heartless, soulless landscape of what the world would look like without a human conscience. 

Joe

JOE                 B+           
USA  (117 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  David Gordon Green

People who are in trouble are the kind I know best. They’re the kind I grew up around. 

—Larry Brown, author of the book, Joe, 1991

Well, it’s not Nicolas Cage from WILD AT HEART (1990), but it may as well be the same guy twenty five years later after he’s spent a stretch of time in the penitentiary for assaulting a police officer, who it turns out was actually assaulting him, while also losing his girl and any thought of family, where all he has left is a rundown house that’s been condemned, a bulldog on a short chain, an old beat up truck, the dirt road in front of him, and as much cigarettes and whisky as he can smoke and drink before he dies.  Surrounded by lowlifes with limited options in life, Joe (Cage) exists in a backwater town, seemingly on a short string, with a raging temper, where he has to drink himself into a stupor just to keep from going off on all the things that aggravate him.  While this is not a David Gordon Green original, as he did not write or even adapt this film, it was adapted instead by Gary Hawkins from the 1991 novel of the same name by Mississippi author Larry Brown, who died in his early 50’s, but wrote about the rural South and the hard-luck people he knew while growing up.  His characters tend to be mechanics, whores, or parolees, hardworking people whose brutal lives are made more complicated by alcohol, sex, and violence, often caught up in circumstances that lead to their own self-destruction.  A spare portrait of the near destitute, Green’s setting shows people barely eking out an existence in an economically ravaged community, where it has the Southern gothic feel of life teetering on the edge, where the day-to-day will to survive is the existing reality, a movie teeming with disturbing characters and a murky regional atmosphere, reminiscent of Billy Bob Thornton’s SLING BLADE (1996), where Thornton was a friend of the author, but also the rural poverty of William Friedkin’s Killer Joe (2011), Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace (2013), Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin (2013), and perhaps most especially Jeff Nichols’ Mud (2012), which has a similar figurehead father and son dynamic.  With the director living in Austin, this is the second film in a row shot in the rural outback of Texas, following the absurdist musings of Prince Avalanche (2013), where this is a powerful character study with Nicolas Cage as the life force of the film, offering a towering performance as an ex-con who continually has to fight his inner demons, where one can only imagine the kind of trouble he got himself into earlier in his life, as he still has that same hellraising spirit, but he’s a likeable figure who knows everybody in the community, who treats everyone with respect, including the police, who have to reign him in from time to time, but he also has a bottle in his hand in just about every scene.   

With a peculiar occupation, Joe manages a tree poisoning business, where the lumber companies are not allowed to remove living trees in areas that need to be cleared for planting new growth, but they can remove dead trees, so his job is to do the preliminary work needed to clear the land, injecting poison into the trunks of targeted trees, using a crew of regulars, including a group of black workers he picks up in his truck at a convenience mart every morning, where the jovial chatter and camaraderie of the workers establishes the rhythm of the film.  Into his life walks Gary, Tye Sheridan, the older of the two kids in Mud, also one of the kids in Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), seen here as a troubled 15-year old boy who is physically abused by his alcoholic father, but looking for work to help support his economically deprived family, which includes a sister that never speaks and a mother that cowers to the intimidation of her drunken husband who spends all the money on booze, leaving them with nothing.  While young Gary is a hard worker eager to learn, Joe is drawn to him, like a younger version of himself, immediately recognizing signs of abuse, where what money he makes is beaten out of him by his monstrous father, often seen wandering aimlessly through the streets as G-Daawg, played by Gary Poulter, who is the real deal, in real life a homeless man with a bipolar condition, discovered on the streets of Austin by the film crew, where Green has a habit of hiring locals for his films.  But he’s not an extra, but one of the featured roles, where Poulter couldn’t be more convincing for the part, literally inhabiting the role, an outsider who is ostracized from his own family and community, which only aggravates his desperate need to drink, making him meaner and more sinister, becoming the darkest and most depraved force in the film.  But he’s matched by another undesirable, Ronnie Gene Blevins as Willie-Russell, a slightly unhinged character that goes ballistics upon hearing insults to his character, a man with a vicious scar on his face, and an axe to grind with Joe, who apparently insulted him at a bar and humiliated him, leaving him little choice but to seek revenge.  The film, by the way, is dedicated to Poulter, as a few months after shooting was finished, he was found face down in a shallow pool of water in Austin, where his death was ruled to be accidental drowning, with “acute ethanol intoxication.”  This fate only accentuates his devastating presence in the film.        

Despite a multitude of secondary characters, the bulk of the film follows Gary’s fascinated attraction to Joe, turning up on his doorstep at all hours of the night, even in the pouring rain, seeking advice for his spiraling out-of-control life, where Joe’s about the only adult person who will talk to him.  There’s a calmness and a decency about Joe around the kid, taking an interest, often showing him how to do things, becoming a father figure even as his own turbulent life is in constant disarray.  With the amount of alcohol he consumes, it’s a wonder that he can even stand through a good part of this film, where some viewers may feel a bit of stereotypical overkill with dilapidated shacks, roadside brothels, dysfunctional families, mute children, killer dogs, and a constant dose of violence and alcohol, as if the film is literally wallowing in its own misery, while Gary’s youth is a constant presence of innocence and the hope that his future can be different.  There’s a sagging morass of dubious moral character attached to Joe, where his unsavory past is never far from the present, as his drunkenness and hair-trigger temper are not a good combination.  When he claims, “What keeps me alive is restraint,” one has to think that’s an attribute he barely recognizes or comprehends.  When the chief of police Earl (Aj Wilson McPhaul) pays him a visit, he’s the one that actually shows courtesy and restraint, where they were both hellraisers in their youth, but Earl’s outgrown that and become a wiser and more responsible man, while Joe still remains a drunken carouser hellbent on anger and destruction.  The interest in the kid brings out an entirely different side of him, where he wants to be stable and protective even as his own life slides into utter chaos.  Gritty, darkly humorous, with turns of extreme violence, this is easily Green’s darkest film, where Cage, in perhaps his best work since ADAPTATION (2002), fights through his own rugged frontier individualism and perfectly navigates his way through the turbulent waters of a depressed community, where he never for a moment finds peace, but he may, through this kid, find purpose.  The uncompromising indie style harkens back to Green’s earliest and still his best work, using his lifelong cinematographer Tim Orr, whose visual poetry is an essential part of the film, along with an ominous electronic score from David Wingo and Jeff McIlvain.  As in the best character studies, filmmakers have a way of drawing us into the unique world of people whose lives onscreen matter, where the outcome is not just powerfully moving, but heartbreaking.