With a growing collection of fine work to his credit, director Christopher Nolan — rightfully becoming heir to cinema’s highest orders — has found yet another way to thrill us, this time in our dreams.His latest, Inception, is an elaborate heist movie that takes place within the fragile scaffolding of a victim’s sleep. The items stolen are not jewels and gems, but powerful ideas. Don’t call it just a heist movie, though; it is so much more, and also so much less. It manages to do something very few Hollywood action extravaganzas do: It provides high-octane thrills with shootouts, car chases and special effects, but also dissects one man’s own very personal story using science so technical and precise that it plays out like an MIT term paper.
Nolan’s fierce one-two punch — big action and personal character studies — is what gave him an edge in Dark Knight, but here it’s fine-tuned even further inside the recesses of man’s unconscious state, to a level that even Freud would find compelling. That Nolan juggles all of his elements— a large cast of A-list actors, a riveting sci-fi plot, hundreds of special-effect shots, a huge nine-figure budget, and a script he’s managed to keep secret for a decade — so precisely is further testament to his powers as a great director.Inception’s thief is Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). Using a machine that fits into a suitcase — which at one point fits into another suitcase, a paradoxical visual — Cobb can boot himself into another person’s dreams, where he accesses their private thoughts to extract secrets. What he steals hardly matters; it could be the formula for Coca-Cola, Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices, or top secret company documents. It's simply Hitchcock’s MacGuffin: everyone wants it, but it is inconsequential to the actual plot. Inception's MacGuffin is the sell-off of an inherited company. What the company does, or what its wholesaling will accomplish, is not important.
Once in a dream, an extractor like Cobb can manipulate the physics of the dream to a certain extent including one scene where Paris seems to fold in half like a piece of paper, and then the fruit stands explode in a parade of colorful shrapnel. And should he die in a dream he’ll simply wake up, or he can always throw himself off a tall building — after all, that dream of falling always ends before we hit the ground.
Early in the film, Cobb is hired to do an difficult, thought-impossible inception job. We learn that inception is implanting an idea into a sleeping brain, as opposed to stealing one. It's no cakewalk since a dreaming mind is not easily tricked, so Cobb and his team have devised layers of dreams that will hide the true nature of their task. By the end of the film, we’ll see four layers — a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream — with the possibility of even more layers that remain unseen. There’s also this business where five minutes of sleep time translates into hours of dream time, and on the deepest levels, a dreamer can experience decades of dreams inside a single night’s sleep. Meanwhile his real body is booted into the suitcase machine while dream versions of himself are booted into dream machines on descending levels that fall down into the rabbit hole. So climbing back out of the dreams means his subconscious must be woken up on each dream level, sometimes they require a "kick" that adds to Cobb's labyrinthine masterplan.
These are heady ideas, but the film handles them without compromising the dense science of Inception’s world. As confusing as it sounds, Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay) seems to enjoy the complexity of the challenges associated with the plot as it descends into maddening new layers of dreams and collective unconscious. His Memento was apparently light calisthenics to prepare for this. Like time-travel caper Primer before it, or even Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Inception will reward sharp or repeat viewers with further science. After I saw it, I immediately wanted to see it again, mostly because it was such a remarkable experience, but also because the plot warrants further examination.
Besides DiCaprio, who proves his talent with each new role, the film is full of wonderful actors perfectly cast in solid, impenetrable roles. There’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer) as a dapper assistant who has different roles within different layers of dreams. In one dream layer, he has a zero-G brawl in a hotel corridor that apparently took weeks to shoot. Then there’s Ellen Page (Juno), who plays a dream architect able to design the basic structure of a dream. Cobb has her audition for the role: “Draw me a maze in two minutes that takes one minute to get out of.” Tom Hardy, who will be the new Mad Max in 2012, plays a forger who can assume the identity of others, one of them being a character played by Tom Berenger (welcome back, Tom).
These characters, as good as they are at their respective jobs, must rely much on team leader Cobb, whose dreams are easily penetrated by the subconscious taunting of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose name has an ominous meaning in Spanish. In one scene, she interrupts the con by sending a freight train tearing through a place that definitely was not meant for a freight train. Although separate from the dream infiltration sequences, this plot element with the wife really allows Inception to expand on the idea of dreams: that dreams are the unrepressed images of our unconscious fighting to express themselves to our conscious self. Eventually, the film becomes more about what reality ultimately is and isn’t, which leads us into Matrix territory. But what the Matrix movies couldn’t do in three movies, Inception does in just one.
Few films can invent their own worlds, let alone their own brand of science. And few films can juggle so many elements so smoothly. The bigger, more innovative, more ambitious movies become the more they expose themselves to risk. Yet here’s Inception, as bold and ambitions as sci-fi movies can get, and Christopher Nolan makes it look so simple with his latest, easily the best film of the summer, and probably the entire year.Don’t bother pinching me; I’m not dreaming.
(I like the photos so I'm posting all of them!)
