Review: "Inception"---7/20/10

I doubt science fiction has ever looked this chic.

Over the course of the weekend, as I’d been tinkering over a few other projects, walking the dog, humoring my dad’s fractured ankle, and ruminating over a second viewing of this summer’s best (not to mention brightest) blockbuster, I came to realize that I was not suffering nearly the same degree of confusion that I had come to expect from Christopher Nolan. And I was a bit sad because of it. At one point during the film,  two women sitting behind me, who seemed to by tripping over the mechanics of “Inception” rather than the story, exclaimed “What’s going on?”
And it wasn’t one of those exclamations where you’re so amazed at the craziness of it all that you’re marveling. "Dude, did you see that?" No. This was just plain confusion. Now, they were pretty loud. I was almost tempted to turn around and tell them that if they would stop talking as if they were in their own living room then maybe they might understand what was going on. But my patience got the better of me and so did my brain. And it got to thinking. What really is going on in Nolan’s movies?

Honestly they are not easy to follow. Interestingly enough, this one began with an idea which the director got mind when he was 16 and it has quite literally grown into the brainchild that is “Inception”, the story about a crack team of “extractors”, men and women who infiltrate a mark’s subconscious to steal the dreamer’s secrets through their dreams in a sort of stripped-down version of "The Matrix". You know, minus all the green lights and leather. Judging from this you wouldn’t be too far off to suppose that it gets pretty messy from there on out.

And it’s in this very way that I find Nolan’s films to be of superior quality. Because they don’t ever reward laziness. And that’s a popular trend these days in big budget movies, to give you the most amount of razzle dazzle with the least amount of thought put into it. Not that that’s always a bad thing. But it’s become something of a disease in most major studios and for Warner Brothers to take a gamble on such a cryptic film, it was really quite...inspiring.

Then suddenly I recognized where my incredulity was born.

I realized I was seasoned in this stuff. A veteran. The proverbial Old Hand. Looking around the theater I observed a fair number of dropped jaws and I could see a younger self in a lot of those faces. After all, it hasn't been until recently that average people have bothered to tackle movies like “The Prestige” or “Following”.  And that's only in the wake of 2008’s “The Dark Knight”, the multi-layered, super-charged noir-inspired duel of DC gods.

I don't mean to come across all holier-than-thou, but I certainly remember what it was like walking into that room for the first time. It was about as stable as the toppling hallway you no doubt caught in the trailer, which was gleefully Hitchcockian in it’s obscurity. All the same the mystique Nolan uses to shroud his work is equally satisfying. It’s a habit that us Nolan fans have become used to: him toying with reality and us falling through the cracks.

And you won’t see unicorns shooting lasers from their eyes here. Nor will you find Cheshire cats or strange wormholes or glossy tie-dyed metaphors. Ironically, there’s a hard reality to Nolan’s dreams. There always have been.

Thankfully that's not just a one-trick wonder thing either. His ability to consistently weave and shape puzzles is, quite literally, virtuosic. Though here I seemed to lack the passionate, bewildered involvement I had the first time I saw “Memento”—a backwards-moving film about a man without memory searching for his wife’s killer—I could always tell I was watching something supremely special.

We start off the way a heist film might. A botched operation. A sly employer seeking the seemingly impossible job. A gallery of tough but professional rogues. A team leader, Cobb, (DiCaprio) whose own personal demons lead him on that white whale of a last mission. It’s all there. Yet the twist is that it’s one big what-if? What if, in the not-too-distant-future of corporate warfare, people can literally invade your thoughts and shoot the place up like it was the OK Corral?

I’ll admit, it is hardly a tacit experiment. The movie comes complete with what I can only describe as an ‘operator’s manual’ in the starry-eyed Ellen Page, who plays a young student recruited into Cobb’s gaggle of Freudian bandits. It’s through her that much of  the extractor’s know-how is transferred to us. Not all of it done gracefully. But once the movie’s temperature starts to rise, I dare you to care. There are lots of ideas to play with and all I will tell you is that the action scenes are some of the most inventive and original ones to date. Period.

But beneath all this polish lies something far more special than boundary-bending. You see, I’ve become used to the structures of these things. There’s a convolution to all of it but I’ve come to realize there’s always a method to the madness, even if you can’t see what it is that’s racing toward you with the speed of a train. And that’s why I was so taken aback by the crowd’s reaction. At points the movie becomes overburdened with its own complexity but it’s kind of like a big beautiful woman concept: the more the better. And in this case, at about two and a half hours, Nolan delivers. On this front and others.

Though this might sell short the experiences, I could only describe the way the director plays with all these intricacies as a perfect game of Tetris. Or the ceaseless solution of a Rubik’s cube. The simple beauty of an anagram or the easy-going pleasure of a jigsaw. And it makes our minds work for their food. Chug, chug, chugging away to decipher what all this fast-paced, hi-octane intellectualism is all about. And Nolan, whose own ideas hover over the entire process, knows how to twist his tales in just the right way, so we’re always endlessly surprised to discover that, after scrambling to locate that final piece of his latest puzzle, it's always standing right in front of us, as he unfolds his palm for us to discover something new. One last time.

Recommended if: A.) You don't mind it when movies intentionally exhaust you. B.) You enjoyed Michael Mann's "Heat" or "Collateral" C.)  If you don't think cerebral movies are just for arrogant college students.

****


Written, Produced & Directed by:
Christopher Nolan

Producers:
Emma Thomas
Zakaria Alaoui.................................................. line producer: Morocco
Chris Brigham...................................................executive producer
Jordan Goldberg...............................................co-producer
Thomas Hayslip................................................associate producer: Canada
Thomas Tull......................................................executive producer

Cast:
Leonardo DiCaprio..........................................Cobb
Joseph Gordon-Levitt.......................................Arthur
Ellen Page........................................................Ariadne
Tom Hardy...................................................... Eames
Ken Watanabe.................................................Saito
Dileep Rao.......................................................Yusuf
Cillian Murphy..................................................Robert Fischer, Jr.
Tom Berenger...................................................Browning
Marion Cotillard................................................Mal
Pete Postlethwaite.............................................Maurice Fischer
Michael Caine...................................................Miles
Lukas Haas.......................................................Nash

Music composed by:
Hans Zimmer

Cinematography by:
Wally Pfister

Edited by:
Lee Smith