Inception
Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche … of writer-director Christopher Nolan, the action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass consensus with The Dark Knight.
Nolan’s follow-up offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows — indicators of high-minded artistry, all. Leonardo DiCaprio has every reason to scowl, shackled as he is to a character named “Dom Cobb.” He’s a corporate espionage hired-gun expert at “extraction”: lifting secrets out of targets’ minds. Drugging them, then joining them for naptime, Cobb can drop in to guest-star in their dreams, where he picks the locks of his marks’ subconscious — often represented as an actual safe box in a movie that signifies everything in dream life with genre-movie totems.
Cobb is planning his “last job before he retires,” a mind-cracking with the untested mission of leaving an idea in his mark’s head. The target is the heir to a corporate dynasty, Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), who must be persuaded to abdicate his waiting throne. This will be achieved by prying open his subconscious and leaving the desired suggestion, using Junior’s daddy issues as a lever. (Don’t linger long over the ethics of mental rape; Nolan doesn’t.)
Following caper procedure, Cobb assembles a team: a researcher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a mimic (Tom Hardy), an apothecary (Dileep Rao) and a novice recruit (Ellen Page). To Page’s character, Ariadne, Cobb lays down the rules of shared dreaming, explaining that “we only use a fraction of our brain’s true potential” — a shopworn line that appears almost verbatim in another new release, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. As Ariadne learns the ropes, we get teasing flexes of Nolan’s effects budget: M.C. Escher stairs and Parisian streets folding over themselves like a crepe. Tagging along on her debriefing, we get glimpses of Cobb’s history and the unresolved anguish over the mysterious end of his marriage. His personal demons inconveniently invade other people’s dreams in the vengeful form of former wife Mal (Marion Cotillard).
The introductions to placeholder characters, the taking notes through the tutorial scenes — it’s all let’s-put-on-a-show buildup to opening night, the heist, a stage for Nolan to show his stuff. Cobb slips Fischer his Mickey on a Sydney-to-L.A. flight. Nolan has blueprinted a colossal sequence inside Fischer’s sleeping mind, an involuted whorl of dream stages leading to deeper dream stages. Team members break off in rear guards, defending one level so the rest can continue on in dreams within dreams. Nolan cross-cuts between each stage as synchronized alarm clocks tick toward zero.
Three set pieces in one! The Neapolitan-ice-cream approach is ambitious but pretty routine when taken apart. Cobb explains his art as “a chance to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed.” Those so inclined can follow the script’s breadcrumbs and read Inception as a metaphor for the act of artistic creation, with Cobb as director surrogate — but Cobb and Nolan aren’t constructing things that never existed. Fischer dreams of a car-chase shootout in the pouring rain (better done in We Own the Night, where action was wired to character emotion) and a snow-blind siege on a brutalist municipal building. The gun-wielding henchmen in Fischer’s dreams are indistinct from the ones who earlier chased Cobb through picturesque Third World streets in what was presumably reality. It’s telling when one character quips, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger,” then pulls out a grenade launcher.
Like Nolan, the dream weavers work from their movie memories (the center of Fischer’s labyrinth is the intersection of Citizen Kane and 2001) and narrative formula. Planning how to get through to Fischer, one conspirator who’s obviously attended a few screenwriting seminars offers: “The stronger the issues, the more powerful the catharsis.” Inception is a spectacle about creating a spectacle, with Nolan suggesting that we filter life through storytelling as he attempts to use these same dramatic rules to move his audience.
That’s the idea, at least. With his inability to let actors occupy a scene together, Nolan couldn’t pass Pathos 101, yet here he’s trying graduate-seminar stuff. The “catharsis” at the center of Inception is based on the choice facing Cobb: either to go on permanent vacation with his dream-memory of Mal or return to real life. But there’s no push-pull around Leo’s torrid emoting, and when the “We’re awake now — or are we?” kicker catches you in the pants, who cares? It’s obvious that Nolan either can’t articulate or doesn’t believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams, and his barren Inception doesn’t capture much of either.
