Quick: What’s a good adjective for Nicolas Cage’s screen presence? Mercurial, perhaps? Volcanic? Volatile?
How about mundane, schlubby, average? Not the page we’d think to turn to in our Roget’s Thesaurus.
Yet here Cage is, channeling his inner drabness to chillingly comic effect in Kristoffer Borgli’s “Dream Scenario.” As Paul Matthews (heck, even the name is drab), a college professor at nowhere famous, he performs his job with perfect mediocrity, and seems a fairly mediocre husband and dad, too.