Wow. I was really liking this movie. Although the massive bald dome is too odd, and the weasel whimp voice is a little too whiny in spots, overall this is a really good performance by Nick Cage. He gets a character that allows him to have some depth. He is a whimpy nerd, but he has intelligence and depth, and he gets to display happiness and sadness, anger and regret. And Nick shows us again that he is simply a good actor.
Equally impressive is the premise of this story. A completely unimportant random fellow learns from friends and family that he is appearing as a background player in their dreams. And suddenly, he goes viral in the dreams of people around the world. Great idea. Nobody knows why. Everybody expects him to have an answer.
At first it is fun and he becomes famous and marketable as the guy in your dreams. This is contrasted with his personal life, where his children, wife, colleagues are all not really comfortable with it.
Then things turn negative for him and as quickly as he exploded...he becomes a negative force to everyone, and everything crashes down around him.
So we get a story that gives us all kind of terrain to explore. Until the 3rd act, when everything is dropped and nothing we've been watching really matters. We get on explanation, but we get a disappointing out of the story. Where we were expecting an answer to why this strange event happened, we are just told all of this validated the collective consciousness as a fact, and that now it is a new method of communication. Our story leaves us in a muddled state, with our sad friend basically hoping he can find his way home to what is now his dreamworld: the life he no longer has.
The direction in the movie is mostly good. Once or twice the standard device of discovering what we just witnessed was really a dream sequence is used, but no big deal, that should be expected in a movie about dreams.
The pace of the movie is mostly good and it never slowed up or went too quickly. No issues with any of the actors, everyone is pretty believable in their roles. Although his wife and her motivations seem to trouble our protagonist, we are never given evidence to make us think she actually deceiving him, and that is a good choice.
In the same manner, we can ask if it makes sense that the people in his class would be unable to separate his dream persona from the reality that he does nothing wrong to anyone, but since the entire premise here is that his dream persona has gone viral, then we can go along with the idea that that persona is the only him anyone actually knows.
So, we have this nice clever funny dark little comedy that just should have come up with a bigger ending that gave us a resolution as to why what happened happened. We should have had a big ending and instead. Instead of an orgasm, we got a fart (yeah...that is in the movie.).
