DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
CAST:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe,
Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Michael Caine, Tom Berenger, Lukas Haas, Pete Postlethwaite
REVIEW:
Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Prestige) reportedly spent ten years writing his screenplay for Inception. Watching the film, I appreciated, not for the first time, not only Nolan’s craftsmanship as a filmmaker, but the level of thought that goes into a plot like this. Some will no doubt call Inception confusing. It definitely is not a movie where you can take a trip to the restroom, and requires a commitment of close and careful attention and concentration, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. Generic shoot-em-up action thrillers where you can check your brain at the door are a dime a dozen, but Nolan has never been content with generic. He makes movies that give himself a challenge, and challenge the audience to pay attention, but the pay-off is worth the effort.
Inception is one of those movies that must be seen- probably repeatedly- to be completely understood, so a quick summary feels inadequate, but here’s the basics. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team specialize in a very unconventional form of corporate espionage- “extraction”, or the invasion of targets’ dreams to steal ideas and secrets from their subconscious minds. The other team members are Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Cobb’s longtime associate, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who makes chemicals that induce deep sleep, and Eames (Tom Hardy), who’s good with weapons and impersonations. Cobb and his team are experienced with carrying out extractions, but now they are hired by a powerful Japanese businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), to attempt the opposite, something believed to be impossible: “inception”- not stealing an idea from a target's mind, but planting one. Cobb’s first instinct is to turn it down, but is unable to resist Saito’s claim to be able to fix his as-yet-unclear legal problems keeping him living abroad and unable to return to the States and reunite with his estranged children. Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the son of a dying industrialist (Pete Postlethwaite), is inheriting his father’s empire, giving him a near-monopoly on the world’s energy supply. Cobb and his team will plant the idea of dissolving the company in Fischer’s subconsciousness, tricking Fischer into believing he came up with the idea on his own, eliminating Saito’s biggest competitor. Cobb hires a new recruit, Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young architect, to craft the environment of the dream. But with the rise of this new form of espionage, corporations and their security forces are scrambling to keep up. Fischer has been trained by mental strategists to defend his mind against invasion, and once Cobb and his team are inside Fischer’s subconsciousness, they find it filled with armed security forces. Of course, they’re figments of Fischer’s imagination, but this is not risk-free. Ordinarily, dying within a dream is a surefire “kick” to wake yourself up and return to reality. But in order to plant the idea deep enough to cover their tracks and for Fischer to avoid realizing what’s happening, they must descend through three layers of dreams, requiring a deeper level of sleep. Dying inside a dream while so heavily asleep could leave you trapped in mental limbo, your body sleeping in a comatose state while you spend infinity trapped in the dream world. And Cobb is unable to control his own mind enough to stop memories of his late wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) from entering his dreams, meaning when Cobb is inside a dream with them, everyone else encounters Mal as well. And going through so many levels of dreams, and dreams-within-dreams, how can you be completely sure when you’ve really woken up?
Inception does a lot of playing around with various concepts including the blurred line between fantasy and reality, the ways we compartmentalize our emotions and memories, and whether a happy dream can be better than a sad reality. I was fleetingly reminded of both The Matrix and, a little more so, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although Inception’s tone and plot is very different. When Cobb steals a romantic moment with Mal in a dream, the logical side of him knows exactly what’s happening, that this is not his wife, merely an echo of the real person, constructed of nothing more than his memories and emotions. But if his memories and emotions are real, is there then nothing of her that’s real? The movie also does plenty of playing around with something else anyone who’s had a dream is probably familiar with- the way things some aware corner of our mind hears or senses in reality is incorporated into our dream. This is done most strikingly during an extended sequence in which the van carrying our team’s unconscious bodies through Level 1 goes off a bridge, and suddenly everyone in Level 2 is floating weightlessly, like astronauts in space. When Cobb is dunked into a bathtub to wake him up, his persona in the dream sees the building flooding around him. When a song prearranged to play at a certain time as a cue that it’s time to end the dream starts playing in headphones attached to their sleeping bodies, the team hears the music echoing eerily through the dream, like the background music in a restaurant. Why does Cobb need Ariadne to build a dreamscape for them to operate in? Because dreams have a shifting reality, where you seem to be in one place one moment, and suddenly you’re somewhere else, with no rhyme or reason. Setting their mission in a dream of their design gives them control over it…in theory. Incidentally, it’s almost certainly intentional that Ariadne bears the same name as the woman in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Cobb also warns Ariadne of two things. Lesson #1: never use places that exist in real life, use places only from your imagination. This will help you distinguish between the dream and reality. Lesson #2: bring something with you, an object of your own design, that only you know the weight and feel of, as a kind of double-check. Cobb uses a top: in reality, it spins, wobbles, and falls over, but in a dream, it spins endlessly. The frequency with which he takes out his top and spins it to make sure where he is suggests that his nerves and his sense of reality might be getting a little frayed.
Nolan’s films, including The Prestige, which was hailed as a mind-bender but, I think, is decisively outdone in that category by Inception, are often described as cerebral, remote and intellectual, stimulating the brain more than the heart. This is generally a fair description, but there is a poignant underpinning to Inception involving Cobb’s troubled state that we don’t fully understand until late in the proceedings, and the backstory of he and his wife Mal, which has tragic elements. It might take a while to show it, but Inception has a heart. If there is truth to the saying that ignorance is bliss, then could he be happier staying forever with his memories in an idyllic fantasy than returning to a grimmer reality?
The actors are all cogs in the machine, but everyone acquits themselves well with what they have. Leonardo DiCaprio is no longer the lightweight pretty boy he came across as in Titanic; since having his popularity blasted into the stratosphere by that role, he has deliberately sought out challenging dramatic roles to establish himself as a serious actor. Cobb is a tricky character, who must engage our sympathy while hinting at unpleasant past actions and secrets, and DiCaprio proves able to convey his character’s haunted soul. There are similarities to DiCaprio’s recent role in Shutter Island, both in the tragic backstory involving his wife, and his character’s blurring of fantasy and reality. Cobb is by far the most complex character; the rest efficiently fulfill their purposes but aren’t developed much beyond that. Saito isn’t really a villain, but he’s a bit of an uneasy ally, and Ken Watanabe has a formidable presence. Saito’s unflappably cool demeanor and intelligence is a little intimidating; on the rare occasion he’s fooled, it’s not for long. Ellen Page’s Ariadne is a useful character for exposition; since she’s the new recruit, it’s necessary for Cobb to explain things to her, which gives the movie a way to explain things to the audience. Marion Cotillard makes Mal enough of a beguiling enigma for us to buy Cobb’s obsession with her memory. Cotillard has an expressive face and luminous eyes, which serve her well here. The other team members are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur, Cobb’s collected right hand, Tom Hardy, supplying a little dry humor as the sardonic Eames, and Dileep Rao (last-seen in a small role in Avatar) as the chemist Yusuf. Cillian Murphy makes a change of pace from his usual creepiness as a man whose most private emotions are used to manipulate him by those around him. In fact, along with DiCaprio and Cotillard, Murphy proves the third character given enough dimension to stir our sympathy. Michael Caine has essentially a cameo, but Caine is one of those actors, like Morgan Freeman, who can make me smile just by appearing, and effortlessly seem wiser than anyone else in the movie. Other small roles are filled out by Tom Berenger, Lukas Haas, and Pete Postlethwaite.
While it spends plenty of time teasing the brain, Inception also provides plenty of action. There are gunfights, car chases, explosions, and hand-to-hand fights, most of them conventional enough in themselves, but made more engaging here by how the movie uses them. Probably the movie's most hyped scene, involving Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Fischer’s subconscious security duking it out weightlessly in a hallway, is one of the most visually inventive fight scenes in recent memory, and may bring fleeting thoughts of The Matrix to mind. The other most eye-popping scene is an expositional segment in which Cobb walks Ariadne through a dreamscape of Paris where the city seems to roll back onto itself until the sky is completely covered by an upside-down ceiling of buildings, people, and cars, like a reflection on a glass ceiling. Admirers of cinematic visual wizardry will likely have a big smile plastered to their face through this scene.
My quibbles with Inception are fairly insignificant next to the innovation on display. While I followed through Level #1 and Level #2 easily enough, by the time we get to Level #3, I felt things were starting to get unnecessarily convoluted, as if Nolan just wants to see how far he can go bamboozling the audience with his barrage of mind games. Ken Watanabe is a good actor, and his Saito is one of the standout supporting characters, but Watanabe’s English delivery is occasionally difficult to understand, which is problematic in a movie like this, where virtually everything said is important to listen to. The biggest action set piece (which takes place in Level 3 and is basically the climax of the film), as Cobb and team storm a snowy fortress where Fischer’s subconscious has locked away a crucial needed piece of info, is a bit generic and underwhelming compared to the earlier nifty weightless acrobatics, like a scene out of Die Hard 2 or Under Siege (although this does lead to a poignant scene involving Fischer and his father…or at least his subconscious projection of him; this scene is similar to the scene in Iron Man 2 where Tony finds the video of his father). The ending leaves things with an intentional dash of ambiguity, and might frustrate some who like things cut-and-dried. I thought that, while not conclusively spelled out, the evidence onscreen leans toward one interpretation.
Christopher Nolan continues to prove his intelligence and craftsmanship as a writer-director, and with Inception, among all the generic blockbusters out there, he has created something wholly original that stimulates the intellect and yet includes enough conventional action to keep the mainstream crowds coming in. If he has set out to top the twists and turns of The Prestige, he has succeeded in outdoing himself. Inception's rewards take an investment of focus and attention, but in my opinion they're worth the effort.
***1/2
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