Imagine James Bond starring in a heist film (Ocean’s Eleven or Rififi will do) crossed with every false reality movie you’ve ever seen, from The Matrix and The Cell to eXistenZ and Dark City.
Now give it an outrageous ensemble cast, the slickest production values 2010 has to offer, and the geometric complexity of a Rubik’s Tesseract, and you might have an idea of Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
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Inception Directed by Christopher Nolan |
The beginning, incredibly, is not strong: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a cerebral thief of sorts, hired to “assemble a team” for “one last mission” in order to “get home and see his kids.” The clichés are unrepentant and the cinematography murky for what turns out to be a slow start.
But the Goldbergian complexity of what is to come requires a lot of groundwork. The system of rules and jargon governing the dream world is fairly tiresome: rules about pain (it exists in these dreams, and in this particular story fairly pervasively), about architects (not quite the Matrix version), about “totems,” dreams and dreamers, dreams in dreams, waking up, and various other details which will resurface later as plot points.
But the payoff, an hour-long dream-state tour de force of continuous action and nested cliffhangers, makes the introduction worthwhile. Having worked his way up to it on the Batman films (remember that amazing gunfight in The Dark Knight? Didn’t think so…), Nolan finally earns his stripes as an action director here with a dizzying melee through a tilting hotel and a fortress siege worthy of 007.
If there’s one shortfall by the end it’s that for all Inception’s crystalline precision, it never really taps into that infinite abyss of the imagination: sure, things crumble and tilt and fold over themselves in interesting, impossible ways, but where is the real dream magic? The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and What Dreams May Come captured bright glimmers of pure fantasy but it never really manifests in Inception, despite the hours we spend dreaming.
Worse, justifiably fearing furious perplexity from audiences accustomed to Twilight and Transformers, Nolan crams too much explanation into his scenes instead of letting the camera do the talking.
What Inception does have in spades is dependably good actors, but the cast is so impressive it actually feels squandered. Don’t expect to see much of Michael Caine, Lukas Haas or Pete Postlethwaite, who in this case, as welcome as they are, bring nothing to their roles beyond the ability of the extras who would normally inhabit such peripheral parts.
Leonardo DiCaprio really owns the starring role, although Nolan doesn’t get quite a Shutter Island performance out of him (Leo’s most recent film is destined to be compared to Inception over any number of similarities, from dream sequences to uncertain reality and achieving closure over a lost wife).
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, and Dileep Rao shine in the supporting cast, although their characters lack depth. This is likely intentional, and the film’s final shot – simultaneously maddening and perfect, pretentious but generous in a way – hints at a universe of possibilities that moviegoers can analyze or ignore at their pleasure.
When all is said and done, Inception is a new high-water mark for movies in 2010 – an intellectual blockbuster – but as thoroughly enjoyable as it is, and as nicely edited, it is virtuosic, singular, only for its audacious editing and for the sinister yet stirring musical score by recurring Nolan collaborator Hans Zimmer.
And so, without wanting to disparage Inception, something rankles about its promotion and the almost dutiful “shock and awe” reaction. Nolan’s film is being billed as the next transcendent mindbender from the director of Memento and The Dark Knight, but to have audiences seating themselves before the picture already prepared to praise Nolan’s singular vision and talent for this, his crown jewel, seems like a vignette in a Vonnegut novel.
The prefabricated blockbuster, the canned masterpiece, robs moviegoers of the chance to discover for themselves an artist and a film that speak to them individually and profoundly. And Hollywood’s self-perpetuating parade of pre-sold “event movies” – most of them resembling Clash of the Titans in quality more than Inception – means that’s nearly all there is on offer these days.
Go see Inception. It’s good. But don’t feel obliged to fervidly adore everything about it.