|
 Much
has been made in anticipation of director Christopher Nolan’s mysterious
new enterprise, Inception. Fans of the director have been seized with
monumental expectations, while others less involved have no clue what
the film’s about at all. Despite my roaring adulation of Nolan’s
The
Dark Knight, I tend to slant toward the ‘wait, what?’ crowd that might
acknowledge and appreciate the insistent ingenuity of Inception’s
twisting plot and stunning visuals, but in the end are left a bit flat
by the film’s strange detachment.
The
future is now and the days when your most intimate, unguarded moments
were your own are gone. Some clever jacks have figured out how to
burglarise your sleep, invade your dreams and plunder all the
subconscious treasures therein. This is a lucrative vocation for one
Dom Cobb, a master in this field, who hires his wares out to corporate
bigwigs for extraordinary amounts of money. Where better, after all, to
hijack your competition’s latest ideas, inventions and deepest company
secrets than right out of their own gray matter with Dom‘s help? Not
that the task is ever simple; the subconscious is a mighty beast and
sensing the presence of something or someone disturbing the bliss of
Morpheus, will attack violently. In fact, many business VIPs have even
been trained against such infiltration by building an unconscious army
to severely rout any invaders. The danger to those inside someone’s
dream is not death in the real world, but the next best thing; you can
feel plenty of pain while in the subconscious state and your waking self
can be lost forever in limbo if you cannot get back out of the dreamer’s
world or die inside it. That peril is atop the actual physical threat
of a company sending out its goons to find the dream thieves in person
and make sure they never wake up in any consciousness. The key to a
good theft is in both its planning and its team, so you first need
people who can easily get into the dreams without alerting their prey’s
defences, next acquiring someone who can manipulate the surroundings
inside the victim’s head to the team’s benefit is a must, also having
some folks who know their way around a gun or a black belt or two
doesn’t hurt, either. The more guarded the dreamer’s unconscious mind,
the deeper the team of crooks has to go into it to retrieve their goal
-- or implant it in the dreamer’s consciousness as is the main objective
here -- and the more danger there is in getting out safely. Of course
while all this is happening, the trespassers must be able to control
their own sleeping thoughts, because unchecked, the lingering ghosts,
regrets and unfinished business that tuck themselves away in the back of
one’s mind may come out to play during the mission and muck everything
up nicely.
Bold
stuff to even consider bringing this complex premise to the screen and
then try to get it across to the average moviegoer in a way that they
will not only understand what’s happening, but be entertained by it.
With Inception you get six of one and a half dozen of the other.
There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief right out of the box: The
hijacking of one’s subconscious is an idea that is interesting enough to
keep an audience attentive and the visuals are at times surrealist works
of art; wonderful renderings of the possible impossibilities of the
sleeping mind. The creation of a dreamed city, block by block in layer
upon layer, whether building outward or upward and the subsequent
crumbling demise of such a delicately structured world is jaw-dropping.
So too is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s gravity-shy battle against some
dream-defending thugs which put me in the mind of Fred Astaire’s
then-revolutionary dance on the ceiling in 1951’s Royal Wedding. Where
Inception fumbles is that it spends so much time folding in on itself
with the same idea of going deeper and deeper into the dream of the
victim, that you are bound to lose your way somewhere. Nolan’s cast is
an ensemble of some of the most talented and downright coolest actors
around today (Most notably Mssrs. Caine, Watanabe, Murphy, Gordon-Levitt
and Hardy). Ellen Page about whom I had previous ambivalence was
great as the voice of reason to Leonardo DiCaprio’s reckless Danny Ocean
of the subconscious. Marion Cotillard is luminous and haunting
portraying DiCaprio’s (mostly) absent wife in what is essentially
a reprise of Michelle Williams’ portrayal of DiCaprio’s (mostly)
absent wife in Shutter Island. Unfortunately with the script’s lack of
any character depth, we don’t give a fig for any of these people outside
of the groovy folks playing them. Not to say that each actor doesn’t
give their all; they seem to know they could be on the verge of
something momentous and really shine, we just never get to know anything
about their roles worth caring about. To make up for the Byzantine
complexity of the film’s idea and perhaps for the hollowness of its
characters, Nolan gives us chase scenes and car crashes galore in oodles
of “dreamlike” slow motion, as if to remind both the audience and
himself that this film is also meant to give a visceral thrill as well
as a cerebral one. That said, Inception’s biggest fault is that it
trips on its own cleverness, taking the ingenuity one dream level too
far. It’s as if the audience is required to be awestruck by the very
attempt of executing such an unfilmable idea that we’re meant to put
such matters as character development or pacing (which drags each
time the team sinks deeper into their victim’s mind) to the side.
Those faults away, Inception is interesting enough in its very
originality and so stunning to look at that it will keep viewers engaged
even if they lose the plot on occasion. Bolstered by its outstanding
cast (and an excellent, powerful score by Hans Zimmer) one can
forgive its hubris and certainly give Inception credit for trying to be
a thinking man’s action movie.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
July
16th, 2010
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