The Dream Man | Film review with Nicolas Cage

He said Nicolas Cageduring the dissemination of The Dream Man, what “nDidn’t start acting to become a meme” – but, whether he liked it or not, that was what fate had in store for him. In the same interview, the actor commented that he has made peace with his status as an icon of the cinephile internet, even though on many occasions the price of this fame is the irony with which many of his new “fans” appreciate the performances he gave himself to. body and soul. “I have no control over this”, proclaimed the star, comparing his situation to that of Paul, protagonist of The Dream Manan ordinary middle-aged professor in every way, who becomes a viral celebrity after starting to appear in the dreams of thousands of people around the world.

The parallel is strong, and it’s obvious that Cage’s performance here is very much driven by an exploration of self-deprecating humor, tempered by the physical commitment that marks his career – but there’s also a fundamental difference between actor and character. While Cage can look at all this from a therapeutically comfortable position, from the height of his fortune and the naturally isolated position of a Hollywood star, Paul has to be real, deal with the real world, while this event absolutely unreal crosses your life. And look at the irony: the social media generation doesn’t treat its icons well when they leave the encrypted environment of the screen and become real people.

Directed and written by Norwegian Kristoffer Borgliwho became one of the names of the moment after the success of his equally provocative Sick of Myself at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Festival, The Dream Man strives valiantly to walk the line between the dreamlike and the realistic, the “outside the box” and the believable. The dream and nightmare scenes, in which Paul quickly goes from passive extra to caricatured villain, give the film its aesthetic power. With the director of photography Benjamin Loebhis partner in the previous film, and the composer Owen Pallett (The box), whose score creates an atmosphere of macabre theater, Borgli skillfully sets up his liminal dream space – a space that distorts reality through the prism of the false, in the uncomfortable mix between the fictional and the true, which both pass before our eyes all the days before bedtime.

Outside of these sequences, however, Borgli relies on the simplicity of the handheld camera, strolling through brightly lit sets in a tone of standard indie comedy. It works because the script The Dream Man fills Paul’s ordinary world with situations as bizarre as those in dreams, albeit in a different way. While, in the imagination of others, the peaceful professor is part of images distorted by fetish, paranoia or violence, in his own day-to-day life the unexplained phenomenon that turns his life upside down creates cognitively absurd situations – because Are these young people suddenly afraid of me, who never did anything to them? Why does Sprite want to do a commercial with me, but no one is interested in what I have to say?

And it is from these cognitive dissonances that The Dream Man establishes the even more fundamental paradox that guides contemporary times, as conceptualized by Borgli and his collaborators. In a world so obsessed with “authenticity” in art, launching an artist who does not write his own songs has become an unforgivable crime, which requires so much assertiveness and proactivity from individuals inserted in the context of the job market and even in interpersonal relationships that are not mediated. by capital, it is precisely the false and passive that have become the safe place where we hide whenever something or someone makes us feel threatened.

This is a problem, of course, because people are real, and they do things. The Dream Man traces the hellish life cycle of the meme that Nicolas Cage will never be, because Hollywood stars (not those of his generation, at least) don’t need to be real. In fact, for all purposes of their public face, they need not be anything more than an image. And Paul, on the other hand, needs it, because he doesn’t know how not to be. The grace and tragedy of the film, of the frustration expressed in Cage’s performance, of the bruised tenderness of Julianne Nicholson like his wife, from the end that is configured both as an act of surrender and as an act of rebellion, is to see what happens when the dream of contemporary times collides with the reality of those who live in it.