No, Christopher Nolan's Inception is not the greatest movie ever made, contrary to what the early reviews and advanced buzz indicated. But following its $100 million ad campaign that included such intriguing trailers and posters, along with quite brilliant viral marketing, a part of me expected it to be just that. As Ben Fritz of the Los Angeles Times points out, Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures dropped $160 million on a production that is neither a sequel nor based on preexisting source material, releasing it in mid-July, an especially risky move to take for such a mysteriously premised film. After the juggernaut success of Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), though, how could it lose? Nolan has become a favorite young director of his generation for a lot of people (myself included) and the publicity never let us forget that he labored over this script for a decade.The film grossed more than $60 million this weekend, but it also generated something of a critical backlash, which should only fuel the word-of-mouth attention it’s been receiving. Both the fans and the detractors make fair (as well as unfair) assessments, but rather than heralding the film as a new sci/fi masterpiece or quibbling with how it lives up to the hype, I’m hoping reviewers may come to accept the film on its own terms once the dust settles. Inception works best not as a piece of existential science fiction about the nature of dreams and reality, but as an extremely stylish, tightly-constructed crime film. Imagine, if you will, an episode of The Twilight Zone had it been directed by a hard-boiled action auteur like Jules Dassin.
Leonardo Di Caprio, who seems to get more interesting every time we see him, stars as exiled American thief Dominic Cobb, a man deeply wounded by guilt and grief after the death of his wife (played by the always luminous Marion Cotillard). The Cobb character continues Di Caprio’s hot streak of brooding, psychosexually obsessive anti-heroes in the throes of a masculine crisis, most recently as the haunted federal marshall in this year's Shutter Island. Here, Di Caprio takes the role to even darker places. Cobb’s heists are not the run-of-the-mill safecracking gigs—he works with a gang of specialists to infiltrate people’s dreams and steal their secret ideas.
When a wealthy Japanese businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires him to plant an idea instead, Cobb is granted the opportunity to return to America to be reunited with his children. It’ll be One Last Job. The target of the “inception” is the heir (Cillian Murphy) to Saito’s corporate rival (Pete Postlethwaite), who can dismantle his father’s company with the proper unconscious persuasion. Teamed with his reliable lieutenant (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Cobb then solicits a chemist to induce the dream (Dileep Rao) and a “forger” to shift identities once inside the dream (Tom Hardy, who at one point turns into Tom Berenger!). Under the recommendation of his mentor and father-in-law (Michael Caine), Cobb also recruits an “architect” to design the dream (Ellen Paige). I’m not giving anything away by noting how the film eschews a conventional twist ending. Having said that, I will tell you that the ambiguous final shot does ask one to reconsider the preceding events in smarter and more compelling ways than most “misdirection” films of late (come talk to me if you want my theory).
There are all sorts of surreal and original set pieces among the most spectacular things I’ve seen on the big screen: a Paris street folds over on itself like some kind of Ouroboros; a hotel corridor turns 360 degrees, leaving characters to tumble and free-fall in zero gravity; labyrinthine urban spaces explode, implode, and flood around dreaming characters as their dreams begin to “collapse.” Those moments essentially punctuate the film’s centerpieces, sequences of breathless action, which has always been Nolan’s comfort zone, and the action throughout Inception is as good as anything he’s ever directed. In typical Nolan fashion, the CGI is reduced to a minimum and as much as possible is done in-camera.
If anything, perhaps the film is just a little too slick for its own good, at times so perfectly controlled to the point of mechanical, which suffocates some of the emotional impact in the end. The common criticism is that for a film attempting to simulate a dream state, there is too much rational explanation, too much action-driven narrative logic, and not enough messy surrealism. I take that point, and, admittedly, Nolan does lean on his Freudian Cliffs Notes. Yet given that the dreams in the world of the film are to some degree meticulously “constructed” as artifice themselves, it doesn’t seem entirely right to expect David Lynch’s fragmented and hallucinatory sensibility of the unconscious run amok. Moreover, the film is primarily a caper movie, and makes little pretention to suggest otherwise. Criticisms over the caper formula reflect the middlebrow bias that genre films built out of intertextual archetypes cannot be art. Umberto Eco argues in his famous essay on Casablanca (1942), “When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion” (11).
A pseudo-intellectual shoot-‘em-up like The Matrix (1999) has nothing on this absorbing trip through the meta-filmic looking-glass. Underneath that flashy exterior of a blockbuster colossus beats the heart of cool, old-school noir, cleverly conceived, well-toned, and executed with the utmost formal sophistication. Inception may be more concerned with character psychologies and visceral affect of mise-en-scene than with thematic profundity, social messages, or a coherent philosophy. However, like the cult classics of pulp fiction, it also stretches beyond its moody and atmospheric suspense to touch the edges of larger, heady ideas. Quoting Eco again, “To become cult, a movie should not display a central idea but many. It should not exhibit a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on in and because of its glorious incoherence” (4). Some critics are calling it nothing more than a skillfully made genre film at best, but I’d call it nothing less. In contemporary Hollywood, isn’t that the only stuff that dreams are made of, anyway?
Rating: **** (out of ****)
