Christopher Nolan’s vision of our dreams isn’t a place of unchecked fantasy and endless possibilities, separating his concept from that of The Matrix. Impossible landscapes are still in play—visualized spectacularly with folding horizons and M.C. Escher trickeries—but they come with a set of rules that, if violated, would cause the dreamworld to quake and dissolve.
In Inception, a movie flashing the signature of an ambitious artsy filmmaker with a mindfuck proposal coming into the possession of a rich uncle's checkbook, Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt play a duo of dream thieves in the world of corporate espionage and sabotage. It's best to know as little as possible about the plot just to let its storyline come in waves over you as you watch it, but the important thing to know is that it's a world where the technology to enter dreams exist casually and idea-theft, called "extraction," is business as usual. Trickier to do—impossible, according to several characters—is what our burglars are hired to do in this movie, which is to plant an idea in someone's head without him realizing it's not his own. This is what is referred to as an "inception."
Dreams are an off-shoot of the real world with faster architecture and engineering that's meant to be a gateway to the target's subconscious. That doesn't mean it's a simple world to navigate. Right at the start of the movie, we're confronted by the idea of dreams-within-dreams, offering multiple dream worlds, each more dangerous to be in than the last. There's no outright villains in Inception, but DiCaprio's Cobb has a tragic past that screws with his subconscious, which has gotten so bad that it's starting to bleed horribly into their missions.
The trouble with setting a story inside the human mind is that, too easily, the setting becomes an excuse for pop psychology and no-limit indulgence. This seems to be something abused quite regularly. Leave it to the man who insisted on a sobering approach to Batman to write a set of very specific and very logical rules on how dreams and the subconscious should operate—which one would think betrays what makes them so attractive.
Why would Nolan do this? Why be so normal and straightforward with so malleable a setting? Throughout Inception, a variety of possible interpretations emerge, with the one that compelled me most being the film metaphor. Being in Inception’s dreamscape is a lot like being in a movie, as Nolan must have also noticed. There's an architect (director), in this case played by maze-building prodigy Ellen Page, who designs the world in which the dreamers roam. There's a subject (audience), here Cillian Murphy's billionaire heir, who is fed a fictional narrative and fills in the gaps the architect misses to maintain their own suspension of disbelief.
There's also a chemist (projectionist), played with nerdy delight by Dileep Rao, who takes everyone in and out of dreams. In Inception, when the chemist allows the sleeper to tumble upside-down, even the best designed dream would tilt. In a film presentation, that would probably raise a few grumbles, but fortunately for us, here the tilting leads to a thrilling set piece where Joseph Gordon-Levitt recreates Fred Astaire's "You're All the World to Me" dance number from Royal Wedding as a fisticuff/gunfight.
Nolan demonstrates these dream-aided feats using precisely their cinematic counterparts. Decades can exist within a span of minutes and several narratives can happen at once while intersecting. In the third act's ingenious ticking-clock scenario, a 10-second action is stretched because in the dream beneath it, it turns into a 3-minute fight scene, and beneath that, it's a one hour infiltration sequence. Time becomes manipulatable, a concept closely knit with film editing. Cobb even explains to us, in one of the film's many expository dialogue: "When you dream, you don't remember how it starts. You always begin in the middle." Any screenwriting guru can tell you that's how movie scenes work. This is a storytelling technique unique to film alone, as it requires the unstoppable and measurable progression of time (something that doesn't exist in a book freely paced by the reader), and Nolan somehow pulls it all off with respectable confidence.
Ultimately, though, I have to admit that a meta-commentary on the construct of cinema is not that pressing of an issue to explore—it is in fact quite navel-gazing. All of this detail is immensely impressive, the caper itself thoroughly engrossing and expertly plotted, so there's nothing wrong with the movie's throughline. On that basis alone, it's a film worthy of seeing. But Nolan aims for something deeper; a deliberation of dreams as a vessel (or prison) for guilt and regrets, and this is the part that proves shakier than the rest.
Stanley Kubrick, as much as he's celebrated as a cinematic pioneer, is also called cold and mechanical often in the same breath; his technical precision and erudite control of tone overpowering the humanity of his characters. I don't presume to compare the two, but doesn't that apply more directly to Nolan? A profound tragedy in Cobb's past is used not as an emotional swim, but yet another cog in the plot's busy machinery. There's a soulful premise in Cobb's backstory, but there's no satisfying impact on Cobb's personality; it's basically just an adversary for him to overcome. Here lies another pattern, one that further extends the movie metaphor: the emotions aren't allowed to just be emotions, they also need to advance the plot. Cobb's fight to keep his family intact is satisfying, but more because it's the objective of a mission, since his parental side is such an abstract concept in the film.
It's a wonderful thing that Nolan always recruits a fantastic ensemble. Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy inject some very much needed charm to two characters who are basically nothing but toy soldiers, while Ellen Page does her best to keep her all-explanation lines lively enough to pass as human speech. Nolan has the plotting, acting, pacing and technique down, but the wooden nature of it all prevents Inception from being whole. The lumbering visceral enigma that it is makes it an exceptionally intriguing movie full of bewildering ideas, though more fun to follow than to contemplate.
"Inception" opens July 16, 2010 and is rated PG13. Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Tom Berenger, Tom Hardy.
