As you can probably tell from the first two examples, these pet projects are something of a mixed bag. There’s usually a good reason why the director in question could never get anyone to finance that project before. Happily, however, Inception, despite its incredible density and very convoluted structure is an astonishing piece of cinema. Nolan’s taken full advantage of the creative freedom offered him here and created the most audacious, astounding blockbuster since The Matrix. The film is worth the price of admission just for the craft alone. From the driving, evocative score by Hans Zimmer (who seems to reserve his best work for Nolan) to the virtuoso editing to the much-ballyhooed (and rightfully so) gravity-shifting fight sequence in a spinning hotel corridor, Inception is a technical marvel of the sort only achievable by an army of craftsmen at the top of their game. But more than that, the film also manages to take the viewer on a journey unlike anything they’ve seen before. And in this summer of dull remakes and lifeless sequels, that feels like a revelation.
Inception is almost impossible to describe in a way that does it any kind of justice, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a highly skilled extractor. At the behest of various faceless corporate clients, he invades the dreams of unsuspecting victims and steals information contained within their subconscious (business strategies, designs for new products, etc.). Saito (Ken Watanabe), having seen Cobb’s skills firsthand, wants to hire him for something a bit more complicated: inception. Rather than stealing an idea, Saito wants Cobb and his team to implant one.
After all the usual heist / con artist stuff (putting together the team, planning the job, etc.), Inception climaxes with a fifty-minute sequence depicting exactly how Cobb and his team go about performing the titular task. And the way it plays out is among the most thrilling sequences in modern film history. Remember that highway chase scene with the motorcycles and the tractor-trailers and the albino twins in The Matrix Reloaded? The film might have sucked overall but that sequence was so assured, so captivating that it changed not only the way big budget action sequences were constructed but also what we as an audience expected from our blockbuster action films. Well, the inception performed by Cobb and his crew is just like that, except it lasts for fifty minutes. It’s the kind of sequence that leaves you breathless and a little dazed but in the best possible way. And it’s the kind of thing only a director at the very top of his game could pull off.
But like any great film, what sticks with you after it’s over isn’t so much the big ideas but the little details that make it all work. Nolan understands this perhaps better than any director working today. His films are so rigorously put together that every detail fits together to form a perfectly unified whole. Inception is thrilling in its complexity, a high-wire act that, despite becoming ever more elaborate, never betrays a hint of not knowing exactly what it’s doing. If there’s one knock on the film that I’ve seen repeated over and over in various reviews it’s that Inception spends too much time explaining how the pieces fit together. But personally I think that’s the most enthralling part of the experience. That Nolan’s worked through every detail is what makes the movie as pleasurable as it. In a film about dreams it would be easy to leave certain things unexplained and chalk it up to the particular logic of dreams. But Nolan’s having none of that. Everything in Inception is worked through to the point of being absolutely airtight.
Take, for instance, the totem that each of these dream thieves carries around, a personal item they use to be sure they’ve woken up and aren’t still dreaming. It’s a little detail that, at first, is just really cool. But by the end of the film, the little lead top that Cobb carries around with him holds intense emotional meaning. Or look at the ‘kicks,’ the synchronized acts of falling the team arrange to pull themselves out of dreams. The idea is undeniably cool and most filmmakers would’ve been content to leave it at that. But Nolan hangs the entire climax of the film on this incredibly complex idea. And in doing so he all but dares the audience to find a flaw in his logic. That they can’t is what makes Inception such a thrilling ride.
Despite clearly having a fascination with the fantastic, Christopher Nolan is an incredibly literal-minded director, intensely interested in the way things fit together. Whether he’s telling the story of a costumed vigilante (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight), a turn of the century magician (The Prestige) or a man who invades the dreams of others (Inception), Nolan grounds all of his films in a completely believable reality. This potent mix of the believable and the fantastic is precisely what makes his films so thrilling. He takes something that’s extraordinary, outlandish or just plain crazy and pokes and prods at it, examining it from every angle until he’s figured out what makes it resonate. And then he reassembles it all into an airtight story plotted to within an inch of its life, every moment meshing with the next like the expertly engineered gears of a clock.
Inception is probably the purest distillation yet of Nolan’s particular filmmaking-as-mechanical-engineering style. But as precisely calibrated as every scene, every shot and every cut are, what really makes Inception resonate is the emotion at its core. And in that regard, Nolan has been making the same basic film over and over for the last ten years: a wounded man, haunted by some tragic event in his past, attempts to assuage his guilt through heroic action but manages only to make things worse. That description could apply equally to Leonard (Guy Pierce) in Memento, Will Dormer (Al Pacino) in Insomnia, Batman (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Alfred Borden (Bale again) in The Prestige or Dom Cobb in this film. But rather than feeling as if it’s covering well-trod ground, Inception is compelling because it’s able to literalize Cobb’s emotional issues. By setting the events of the film largely within the world of dreams, Nolan is able to re-contextualize Cobb’s grief and pain in such a way that it reinvigorates what might otherwise come across as tired and boring.
The emotional core of the film is the exploration of the broken marriage of Cobb and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). After dying tragically sometime in the past, Mal now exists only in Cobb’s subconscious. But the version of her he’s created in his mind has become warped and twisted to the point where she threatens both his missions and his life. Mal, despite Cobb’s love for her, becomes the villain of the film because of Cobb’s inability to deal with his guilt over her death. And only by confronting this villainous version of his wife can he ever really let her go.
That’s not, of course, the most original idea in the world. Neither, for that matter, is one of the film’s major subplots: Fischer’s reconciliation with his estranged father. But by literalizing these conflicts in a way that’s only really possible in dreams, Inception is able to reinvigorate them to such an extent that they become as compelling if they were brand new. How many times have we seen some character break down and cry because he can’t let go of his dead wife? At this point it’s beyond tired. But transform that dead wife into a villain who shoots her husband’s partner in the leg then stabs him in the gut and the same emotional struggle becomes suddenly very resonant. By externalizing an internal conflict, Nolan creates something we’ve never seen before, something that could only take place in the particular universe he’s created within this film. And in doing so, he reinvigorates a tired cliché, reminding why it ever became one in the first place.
Similarly, one of the film’s other more emotional moments is one we’ve seen a hundred times before: Fischer (Cillian Murphy) reconciling with his father on his deathbed. The twist here is that this scene takes place completely within Fischer’s subconscious. It’s a dream within a dream within a dream and bears no resemblance at all to the reality of what actually happened between this father and son. And yet that’s precisely why it works. Because the audience knows this isn’t how it really happened, that it’s a fantasy-- what Fischer wanted to happen rather than what did happen-- that it’s so emotionally affecting. Knowing that it’s fake and yet still emotionally true allows the viewer to be taken with it in a way that simply playing the scene straight never could. It’s an end run around a familiar trope that still manages to harness all the power of that cliché because Fischer wants so badly for it to be true.
Nolan is smart enough to know that audiences won’t continue to fall for the same old grief and daddy issues that have been the emotional underpinning of so many other films in recent years. Yet those issues, when handled correctly, are undeniably powerful. By harnessing the power of dreams in telling the emotional stories of these characters, Nolan has managed to breathe new life into issues that should, by all rights, no longer affect us. Thus, even though Nolan might be the most repetitive director outside of Spielberg working today, his films manage to find new ways to surprise and delight.
And then, of course, there’s the film’s incredible (and I think soon to become indelible) last shot. To describe it would be to spoil it but suffice it to say that it will be argued about for years to come. The ambiguity inherent in that argument is, of course, the point and it’s the perfect note on which to end a film that is at once both incredibly powerful and yet somehow ephemeral (as are, of course, dreams). What the last shot actually signifies is as irrelevant as whether or not Fischer’s reconciliation with his father had any basis in fact. It’s not about objective truth or ‘reality’ but rather about the subjective experience of the character and the viewer. Read whatever you want into that shot because how you choose to interpret it is all that really matters.
Inception is, like the shared dreams it depicts, a sort of shared dream experience for the audience. We bring our unique experiences, emotions and worldviews into the film with us and because of its various ambiguities, we all get something slightly different out of it. There’s really no more perfect embodiment of a film about dreams than that.
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