Inception is, under all that big summer movie makeup, Chris Nolan's manifesto on art (film in particular). It unwraps what movies and movie makers can do formally, conceptually, and even *gasp* morally. Nolan's already shown us some of this in his oeuvre. He's told us what he thinks about revenge. He's shown us new and complex ways to manipulate narrative time. Inception is the conflation of all his brainy ideas. Roger Ebert wrote that what stuck out for him was the intense concentration that must have been involved in the film-crafting. Possibly, Nolan is our most daring, most skilled auteur; he just happens to have access to huge budgets and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Cobb (Leo) steals secrets. He creates dreams and drops in his mark (usually a rich and powerful dude) from whose subconscious Cobb tries to pry valuable info. One such mark is Saito, the CEO of a major Japanese energy company. Cobb fails but impresses Saito enough that Saito turns around and offers Cobb a job. However, the assignment isn't to steal memories but to implant an idea (Cobb digresses on how an idea is almost indestructable and once it's conceived it perpetuates). Saito wants his rival to develop the desire to dissolve his own company. Inception, not deception. Cobb accepts because if he succeeds, his criminal record will be cleared and he'll be able to get to his kids in the US.
Inception says it's about dreams versus reality, but it isn't really. Dreams aren't built, they don't need architects and a crew. Films do, though. As Cobb tutors his apprentice Ariadne, Nolan tutors his audience. Dreams, Cobb explains, can't be really real, just vivid enough to be believable. Nolan is saying the same about film. There's an especially telling line when Cobb explains that the more you subvert the dream's established rules, the mark's subconscious notices and turns against the architect. I started thinking, how often does that happen in movies? The more a filmmaker cheats, the more I notice him and get pissed at him.
So as I think about the first hour or so, of Cobb lecturing Ariadne, I can't help connecting Nolan with every gambit and statement Cobb makes. Say, on the challenge and payoff of implanting ideas. That's what any good 6 o'clock movie does. It keeps its viewers' wheels moving for hours and days following. Of course, alongside payoff, there's dangers and, therefore, responsibility. Cobb makes the mistake of, for example, creating a solely self-serving dream. Of course, films are meant for an audience not for its maker. Directors like Paul Thomas Anderson (think Magnolia) and Woody Allen (bad Woody Allen, not the Woody of Crimes and Misdemeanors) have to sometimes fight off the self-indulgent label. Cobb also makes the mistake of creating without getting rid of some personal baggage i.e. guilt associated with his wife Moll. In the dreams, she appears prompted by his subconscious and acts as a saboteur, killing Cobb's crewmates and snitching to his marks. Does Nolan think he's got some demons that could tear down his work?
Arguably, Inception's best achievements have to do with Nolan's formal moves, moves that I don't think I've ever seen before. There's Joseph Gordon Leavitt's 2 hotel hallway fight scenes: one in zero gravity, the other as the hotel litterally flips down a hill. Time also gets manipulated in novel ways. We've seen films go backwards and films with the sequence screwed and chopped. Inception, though, works on the miniscule infinities on a timeline (how a minute can be divided into 60 seconds, into 120 half-seconds, into 240 one-quarter seconds...). As Leo and his crew go from dream, to dream within dream, to dream within dream within dream, time in each subsequent dream slows down. So 30 seconds in the top dream becomes 10 minutes in the lower dream. This is post-pomo Matrix (and if its true that Nolan started this script ten years ago, we know the Wachowski brothers implanted an idea in him).
These tricks, though, don't point loudly at the wizard behind the curtain since our protagonists go to great lengths to establish the internal rules of this universe. But because they spend so much time doing so (about an hour in real-time, a week within the film) the movie feels a little cold. It's missing the visceral emotions of Nolan's previous films, Leonard's anger in Memento and Robert and Alfred's symbiotic jealousy in The Prestige. Inception is like a lit lecture given by that really suave, good-looking, well-dressed prof. But school is school and sometimes it's not as fun as getting engaged with the course material. Inception somewhat fails, then, in its earnest attempt for gravitas in the form of Marion Cotilliard's Moll, Cobb's wife. Her tears seem real when Cobb explains why he needs to let her go; it's just not enough warmth to melt some of the ice.
As a cathartic, involved spectacle, Inception isn't Batman Begins or Memento. Inception is, though, arguably Nolan's most spectacular achievement. It looks and sounds and feels like an entertaining, balls to the wall actioner when it's really a meditation on art (!?). The ideas he planted in my brain? Still growing and still resilient even 3 days since.
Great review! One thing that's great about Inception is the way special effects are used to tell the story. That fight scene with Gordon-Levitt in the hotel hallway is brilliant, as are all the scenes of the buildings folding on top of one another. I didn't once feel like this was over-the-top or gratuitous. Contrast this with fucking Avatar and how even the effects in that movie were boring. Of course no amount of movie magic could make that story work.