I don't think this is a great movie, but it's a very interesting movie, well acted (especially by Nick Cage, who every once in a while decides to tone down the "Nick Cage-ness" and remind people that he's an amazing actor) with some great ideas and scenes that will stay with me for a long time (including some intentionally laugh-out-loud moments and some moments that I found more unbearable than any horror movie). The basic premise of the film is that college professor Paul Matthews, an evolutionary biologist with the most unflattering hair (the worst kind of bald - Cage is certainly not vain) starts appearing in people's dreams. In fact, the film opens with him appearing in one of his daughters' dreams. At first, he is maddeningly passive, just standing and watching as, more often than not, horrible things are happening to the person whose dream it is. Paul is not surprised that he's in his daughter's dream (if a little disappointed at how unassertive he is - perhaps because he's aware of how inert he is in his own life) but pretty soon strangers start looking at him funny, starting with the woman who admits him into the fancy restaurant where he has arranged to meet a far-more-successful academic who was a fellow graduate student with him and whom he suspects of ripping off the ideas he talked about even back then. She's got an article coming out in Nature on the subject and he wants her to credit him. Before the meeting his wife (whose childhood home they live in and whose last name he took) asks him to record the conversation, as she wants to hear her concession. But she concedes not an inch, mocks him when he asks if she's going to use his phrase "antelligence," and he ends up begging her. Not for the last time in this movie, he is disgusted at himself, erases the recording and lies to his wife that he forgot to record it. (Later in the film we see him raging over an article in a magazine about the academic, prominently using the phrase "antelligence." But all of this could have been avoided if he'd've written the book he keeps talking about, but that he hasn't even begun.)
Anyway, soon everyone in his class has dreamed about him and he actually seems to enjoy talking about the dreams and taking selfies with them. Then, when he and his wife are leaving the theater, an old flame accosts him and asks to meet him for coffee (to his wife's annoyance). Turns out she writes for an online magazine and wants to write about the phenomenon of him appearing in people's dreams. This quickly leads to him going viral and a TV interview.
Which in turn leads to him being called to some snowy city (Chicago?) where a cutting edge advertising firm, run by a successfully obnoxious Michael Cera, pitching him with ways to monetize his current fame.
They're very much in favor of him pushing Sprite, but he just wants to find a way to get a book deal for his ant book (that they insist on calling a plant book). Complicating matters, a young female member of the firm has been having sex dreams that feature him, which leads to the most squirm-worthy scene in this, or possibly any, movie (you will never think of farting the same way again). Again: Cage has no vanity.
Well, it turns out this new phase of dreaming is not going to go well for Paul, because the vast majority of people, starting, again, with his daughter, have been having nightmares where he is the monster. No longer content to stand and watch bad things happening, Paul is now the instigator. This leads to his entire class refusing to be in a room with him, and, after a badly botched attempt at therapy, to them taking revenge on their persecutor by painting "LOSER" on his car.
Things go from bad to worse from there - his deal with Sprite evaporates even as a possibility, and a mooted meeting with Obama is long gone. Only the French are unperturbed by the fact that he is now a nightmarish figure. The parents at his daughter's school demand he be banned. People want him out of a restaurant and he gets into a fight. His online apology is deemed self-serving and self-pitying and his wife kicks him out. He is offered a place in his dean's basement (the dean's wife isn't too keen) but can't find the switch to turn off the buzzing striplight, and in a sleep-deprived frenzy, accidentally injures his daughter's teacher while trying to get in to see her in the school play.
There is a coda, involving an obnoxious tech-bro who invents technology to put ads in dreams, but in general this film is let down by its ending. But I think it's said enough by that point. You can tell it's directed by a European, even though all the actors are American (but all of the actors look like normal people). it has a decidedly European (specifically Scandinavian) sensibility. Paul never gets better. He never becomes more assertive or less of a loser. There's no Hollywood ending to make you feel better about all the indignities Paul has suffered. Anyway, watch it and tell me what you think it's about.
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