Cover illustration of Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact comic book, Vol. 11 No. 5, November 3, 1955
Inception is an odd summer blockbuster, for sure. The success it continues to have (three weeks in the #1 spot at the US box office) indicates that it has a broader appeal than I would have guessed, but the movie's vociferous detractors show that its charm is hardly universal. A lot of people take pot-shots at the movie for being crass pulp masquerading as highbrow art, but I don't think director/writer/producer Christopher Nolan is interested in whether his story qualifies as "art". As he has done in the past with movies like Memento and The Prestige, he has created with Inception a cold but elegantly constructed narrative that has much more to do with "craft" than "art".
Nolan's craft is not going to hold everyone's interest - Inception is accused of being overlong, full of plot holes, and emotionally disconnected, and many viewers are simply going to see it that way. There's nothing to be done about it. For me, though, there's a lot to love in the crystalline structure of Nolan's narrative, the eerie parallelism in the recurring pieces of dialogue, and the mundane, architectural portrayal of his dreamscapes. The movie never seemed long to me - Nolan takes the requisite half-hour to set up the rules of his game, explaining to the viewer that we are working with an alternate present (or near past/future?) where a technology exists that allows people to share dreams. Initially used for military training, a dream-based form of corporate espionage called "extraction" soon came into prominence - this introduction prepares us for the heist format the movie follows, as well as the peculiar rules that the team will be playing by for the film's remaining two hours.
The nested narratives of Inception have their problems, especially in the case of the alpine retreat "dream level", but the masterful editing ties them together with the fun complication of each thread measuring time differently from its predecessor. The cast is well-chosen, with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Tom Hardy turning in excellent supporting performances, although it's hard to tell at times if Ellen Page (playing new extractor Ariadne) has been given a thankless role or if she's actually totally out of her depth. And at the center of this delicate machine, you have Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Cobb, the leader of our team of bandits. The emotional ballast of the movie falls squarely on him and his complicated relationship with his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). Predictably, their relationship is portrayed in a very cerebral way, but I found myself genuinely moved by a few key moments between the two - even in the absence of sentimentality, Nolan can use careful dialogue and some key visual elements (especially a closeup of a rattling railroad tie) to evoke emotion.
Nolan portrays dreams in such a mundane, unfanciful way that it is clear that he is not that interested in dreams themselves - Cobb and his team even refer to dreams as "levels", like the designed layouts found in a video game. Dreams are really a stand-in for storytelling itself, and Nolan uses the dreams of Inception to reveal some of his views on storytelling. Early in the film, Cobb tells Ariadne the keys to a good dream: 1) borrow bits and pieces from other places but never steal entire structures, 2) avoid messing with the rules too much because it will disorient the dreamer, and 3) plant ideas subtly so that the dreamer does not know when he/she is being manipulated. If you take a step back, this is a mission statement for Inception itself, a slightly skewed heist movie that references movies from Last Year at Marienbad to The Matrix and messes with the viewer's expectations in both obvious and non-obvious ways. That's pretty "meta" - you can gripe about Nolan's execution in making a good summer blockbuster, but it is hard to argue with his craft.
"Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect" by the Decemberists
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