Wait.
I want my vote back.
Not that I had one — with the Oscars, at least. But I did have one with the Critics Choice Awards, and like dozens of other critics, blindly and blissfully joined the vortex that was Barbenheimer down the awards rabbit hole.
I see now that I was mistaken. And the best movie of last year was a Christopher Nolan ripoff to boot.
Meet Dream Scenario, an under-the-radar horror-comedy (hormedy?) that went virtually unnoticed last winter as Oppenheimer won every award under the irradiated sun.
The American feature film debut of Kristoffer Borgli of Norway, Scenario is visually stunning, narratively taut at 102 minutes, and smart as hell, dropping references to everything from Carl Jung to David Byrne to neuro-biologist Robert Sapolsky. This is the movie Franz Kafka and Jung would have made together.
Yet even with its grade point average, Scenario is easier to follow than its lofty inspiration, Inception. As in that Nolan thriller, dreams in Scenario are but a landscape, as navigable as a shopping mall with a locator map.
Of course, none of this works without Nic Cage, who turns in his best performance since Adaptation. He again plays a balding, paunchy, insecure hero, which is this actor’s awkward wheelhouse. When he affects his passive aggressive whine, Cage may be America’s most convincing antihero.
Even when he’s dreaming. Especially when he’s dreaming.
Cage plays Paul Matthews, a forgettable academic who suddenly appears in the dreams of strangers. He becomes a viral sensation, particularly when that sensation turns dark.
The movie is a reflection of pop culture’s capricious (and fleeting) taste, cancel culture and social media’s hypocritical obsession with genuineness — as seen through the jagged sensibility of, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Ultimately, though, Dream Scenario tackles life’s largest questions: What is worth dreaming about? What is worth a dream’s fruition? Can you tell the difference between fantasy and reality?
Scenario may not hold all the answers, but isn’t afraid of any questions. Hollywood once dreamt of such things.
