NOTHING HAPPENS UNLESS FIRST WE DREAM
Inception
*** (barely)
Review by Joel Frost
For the first forty-five minutes or so of “Inception”, Christopher Nolan’s latest brash endeavor, one has the sense that things are teetering on an edge. It’s a familiar precipice, not unlike the expectant fitfullness one can feel before sleep. That period of time can seem interminable, no matter how long it lasts. There’s an expectancy, a hope for the pleasant haze that often follows. There’s no certainty, however. A rough jolt into harsh reality may be all that’s in store. The exposition of sleep, let’s call it. If one focuses, one can start to see and feel the end of it. Ideally of course, there’s little need for this phase to be protracted. Sleep, movies, and reviews… all best if they don’t muddle too much in the in-between portion of matters. Best to get to the point.
Fortunately, “Inception” does eventually get to the point. This is a tale of two films, really. The first section is a long preamble, filled with stilted exposition and loose detail (broken up by one magnificent on-foot chase sequence) that has an inherent immaturity. Nolan is so in love with his idea for this film that, for a while, it comes off as an eager and panting adolescent who’s dying to tell you the good part of what he’s just come running from, yet knows it won’t seem nearly as interesting without the fairly mundane set-up. The best writers and directors can usher an audience through this section without it feeling stilted and rote. Nolan hasn’t perfected this aspect of his artistry.
Ever so slowly, though, the film rounds into form. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a dream infiltrator. He is a master of stealing thoughts and ideas from the sleeping minds of those who have thoughts and ideas that make money. Cobb, with the help of a B-Team of assistants, find themselves inside the slumbering head of the enunciation-challenged Saito (Ken Watanabe). He dodges their best efforts and then, when they all wake up, asks to hire them for a mission of great importance to him and his bank account.
Money isn’t the only motivator here, though. We learn that Cobb is a fugitive from his homeland (the USA), a situation that arose from some kerfuffle with his now-dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard, a bright light we long to go toward). His children are still in the US and he’s dying to return. Saito has the power, with one phone call, to clear the path for Cobb. It’s not an easy thing that Saito is asking of Cobb and his cronies, though. Inception (from the title), or the planting of an idea, rather than extracting one, is what Saito needs. He’d like a rival to come upon an unlikely decision, and he knows that if anyone can insinuate the idea into the head of the rival (Cillian Murphy), it’s Cobb.
What is slowly revealed in “Inception” is that the dream world that is shown is fairly similar to the “real” world that Cobb exists in. As Mal points out to him during a dream sequence, the way in which he is pursued by anonymous agents (apparently to hasten his extradition to the US) in the “real” world is almost indistinguishable from the way various inhabitants (increasingly violent representations of the dreamer’s subconscious, it is explained) pursue him and his cronies in dreamyland. The question then arises: Is Cobb a denizen of the real world who occasionally visits dream worlds, or is his reality perhaps a dream in itself. Mal complicates Cobb’s perception of this by tearfully asking him to come join her and the children by waking himself up… by shooting himself. Counter-intuitive, of course… but perhaps the right choice.
Ellen Page is along for the ride as the architect of most of the depicted dreams and contributes as either bland or understated, depending if a viewer is alert or half-awake while she drones her lines. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, fresh from the worst movie ever made in the history of mankind, “(500) days Of Summer”, manages to serve his duties decently (let’s hope he remains a perennial side-kick). Michael Caine shows up and delivers a few lines. In particular, he asks Cobb to “come back to reality”. Whose reality, though, is reality?
It’s this device that lies at the heart of “Inception”. It’s also the stumbling block of many stories, whether depicted in film, literature, oral tradition, etc., for ages: usage of the deus ex machina that “nothing is real”. It can often be the thinnest of ruses, the sign that a piece is flawed and shallow. For if no reality matters except the one that the writer chooses at a particular moment, then a writer (and consequently an audience) is often utterly adrift in directionless nonsense, disguised as complexity (see: “The Matrix”).
“Inception” manages to narrowly avoid this central pitfall. Nolan finds his stride after an early clumsy lull. The sense that Cobb, Mal, et al are in-between realities is not abused or manipulated as a license for carte blanche. Nolan reels the audience in with a thin tether, and the effect of not knowing with absolute certainty whose reality is the absolute truth does not feel empty.
Cobb carries, as each of the dream inhabitants do, a personal token… in his case a small top that he spins. It will eventually succumb to the physics of the world around it; in the “real” world, gravity soon ends its activity. “Inception” calls into question the very physics that we take for granted, though, with many fine MC Escher-esque panoramas and situations. When one is constantly immersed in these various worlds and indeed can construct them and inhabit them happily, while also manipulating the minds of others and one’s own, how can one rely on the spinning of a small top as the absolute proof of what is real? Nolan sets this up as the core question, and it pays off in a teetering yet somehow rewarding ending. There. Now I have planted the idea in your head to see this movie. That wasn’t so hard.
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Release Date: July 16, 2010
Run Time: 148 Minutes
Country: USA
Rated: PG-13
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
