Confederate Wing

Inception

Having watched and reviewed all of Christopher Nolan’s feature length work prior to Inception (his seventh film), I must confess that I feel far more qualified to offer my thoughts on this movie than I would have a mere week ago. This whole project has given me a fair amount of both insight into the man’s work and perspective as to how it should be valued and weighed against its contemporaries. And while I can’t honestly say that I care very much for his take on Batman or the gambit at the end of The Prestige, Nolan’s entire body of work has been impressive. He is almost certainly one of the most gifted filmmakers at this level in the industry today, and I’m pleased to report that Inception continues his sterling career with what I would consider to be his best work since Memento, a film which brought him to our attention ten years ago.

For all of the mystery in which Nolan’s most recent project has been shrouded, between vague action packed trailers and disorienting posters, it may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that Inception is a rather straightforward and simple affair (at least when it comes to Nolan). Anyone familiar with his non-Batman films shouldn’t need to be told that the opening sequence is not to be disregarded, and Inception is no different. Such films begin where they will soon come to end, which I mean less as a spoiler and more of a piece of advice. In fact the entire film, for all its uncharacteristic simplicity, still requires the sort of investment from an audience that renders them unable to take their eyes of the screen. It’s not exactly dense, but there’s a certain quickness and assumed level of comprehension to it, which means that a person taking a quick washroom break and expecting to be in the loop when they return is not an option.

Inception is straightforward yet elaborate, and complicated without being confusing. It may sound like a bit of a paradox, but really, I assure you it’s nothing by which to be intimidated. The plot is simple enough, dealing with a group of people as they prepare for and execute a daring cerebral heist. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a character likely so named and characterised to evoke shades of the man from Nolan’s feature debut) assembles a team of thieves of the subconscious to plant an insidious thought in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a powerful energy company. Cobb’s employer, a man named Saito (Ken Watanabe), is a rival to the Fischer energy empire, and is aiming to capitalize on the situation by subconsciously convincing the young Fischer to abandon his trade, leaving himself with a monopoly. In return, Cobb will be able to return home.

Really, it’s in the presentation where things begin to get interesting. In lieu of any twists and turns, such as the betrayals or double crossings one might reasonably expect from the man behind Following and The Prestige, Inception spends far more time establishing the film’s context and infrastructure than fleshing out its players. Any surprises are ones of revelation or sequential trickery, not necessarily of character motivation hitherto unbeknownst. Unfortunately, this leaves the dialogue rather dry and the players somewhat plain and uninteresting. Characters speak mostly in exposition, with far more effort being put into explaining the rules of the dream as opposed to giving us a reason to care for the dreamers. Only Cobb gets a well rounded treatment involving a suicidally depressed wife (Marion Cotillard), now deceased, haunting his dreams as a shade.

As for people like the architect (Ellen Page), the forger (Tm Hardy), and the chemist (Dileep Rao), questions like who they are, where they came from, and how they stumbled into the world of subconscious espionage take a backseat to making sure that Nolan’s construction appears as compelling and legitimate as possible. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with sacrificing fully developed characters for a fully developed world. Truth be told, some characters, such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s point man and Tom Hardy’s forger, are so gussied up in their meticulous mannerisms and outfits that they don’t need depth to be any more affecting. The fact that they’re all well portrayed certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

Unfortunately, Nolan’s construction isn’t flawless. The world of dreams, according to him, is made with half of the mind devoted to building and populating the dream manually and the other half to propagating it automatically. Cerebral extractors or inceptors move between the cracks in the two part process, infiltrating and redesigning the landscape to suit their needs at the risk of drawing the attention of the mind’s projections, which are hostile to everything for which it isn’t responsible. What this essentially means is that Nolan frees himself of accountability for everything in the dream world that seems unreasonable.

The major points, such as the stability of the dreamworld depending on the peace of the subject, work well enough, but there’s one particular nuance that will surely threaten to break some illusions. You see, a subject is never able to recall exactly how they end up at their current position in a dream, which means that all dreams are entered in medias res. While the question of where dreamworlds end and begin, even when they stack upon each other, is handled by making dreamscapes nicely varied from each other, the position, outfitting, and equipment of the thieves from one dream to the next just seemed terribly convenient. True, the architect does design the dreams with immaculate detail and precision, and part of dreaming is the ability to manipulate everything at a whim. Yet such a fact gives the impression of cheap convenience more often than not, despite the sound logic suspension of disbelief grants. Aside from this quibble, I also have to wonder about the reasoning that lets Cobb infect the subconscious of others with the hostile projection of his dead wife, since her meddling also felt a bit too contrived as well.

Perhaps you’ll forgive me for letting my queries get the better of me, but if nothing else, such musings should attest to the power of Inception to be thought provoking. Even though I found the film to be far shallower than its trailers and adverts eschewing reality led me to consider initially, it is still artful enough that there will almost surely be some merit to a second (or even third) viewing. If nothing else, it’s certainly one of those rare films that gives the impression of being as gratifying and rewarding for as far as it’ll be allowed to be. It’s intelligent enough to demand scrutiny and clever enough that it’ll probably hold up to most of it.

When it comes to the somewhat more base level of living up to its expectations as a popcorn blockbuster, there too Inception succeeds triumphantly. There is ample gunplay, brawling, some tense scenes with a knife, and even a good old-fashioned car chase. In fact there’s a particular sequence in which Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) fights two men in the hallway of a hotel as the orientation rotates and changes, which is a scene nothing short of breathtaking. Buildings crumble, gravity and time are manipulated, paradoxes are formed, and all of this happens to the beats of some truly stellar camerawork. Wally Pfister, a stalwart collaborator with Nolan since Memento, knows how to frame some stunning sequences for all their worth, and finally gives Nolan the same action director pedigree as Favreau, Spielberg, or even Cameron. Even the thundering score of Hans Zimmer, perhaps his most iconic work since The Pirates of the Caribbean, keeps driving Inception forward with an intensity that on its own would demand the IMAX experience.

Inception masquerades as a thinking man’s science fiction blockbuster, a film that demands every iota of an audience’s cognitive will to decipher. In actuality, this isn’t quite the case. Whatever cryptic nature exists is a result of Nolan’s peculiar architecture, which is rather appropriate for a movie ostensibly about building dreams. Held against Nolan’s rather sterling filmography, which includes the film school study of Memento and the neo-noir gem that is Following, Inception is certainly a more straightforward affair. Against the adaptation driven summer season where the likes of Transformers, Twilight, and the Marvel comic book flavour of the year clamour for dominance, Inception is intellectually untouchable. In the end, perhaps Inception will end up regarded as a cinematic experiment used to gauge whether or not audiences are willing to invest in more cerebral blockbuster fare. I sincerely hope they are, since I wouldn’t mind seeing similar such dreams in a post-superhero blockbuster landscape.