Inception (Four Stars)
U.S.; Christopher Nolan, 2010

It begins with a man washed up on the beach, awaking as if from a dream, waves crashing around him.

What happens next? Christopher Nolan’s Inception, — with Leonardo DiCaprio as a tortured guy who shoves dreams into your head — is obviously some kind of masterpiece. It’s a truly mind-bending science fiction movie about the power of dreams, the persistence of memory, the anguish of lost love, the chains of conscience and maybe the sheer lunatic joy of making a big, crazy action movie spectacular with no rational limits on either your budget or your imagination.That cliché “Mind-Bending” is actually the right word (le mor juste) here. Nolan uses the magic of movies and moviemaking to try to bend our minds and play with our heads, to put our imaginations into overdrive and to expand the boundaries and possibilities of big-budget studio movie-making. (And he does it, in this age of Pixar, for adults, for once).

At one point, Nolan folds a whole packed Parisian street in on itself. Later, he turns a plush hotel corridor into a zero gravity battlefield, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as DiCaprio’s right hand man) swimming through the air or dancing from wall to ceiling to wall like Fred Astaire hoofing in the revolving room of Royal Wedding. At others, Nolan and his company drive an express train through a Los Angeles street in the middle of a car-chase shootout, or have two characters walk up (and simultaneously down) on a set of steps modeled after M. C. Escher’s famous Moebius Strip endless staircase, until the movie’s effects wizards break the steps loose and set the walkers free.

Nolan, like the young Orson Welles, blessed (and cursed) with the moviemaking tools that Welles compared to the world’s biggest electric toy train set, summons up one surreal image or ferocious action blowout after another. Brilliantly, swiftly, he (and editor Lee Smith) cut from year to year, character to character (DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb, his team, his employer, his target and the tormentors in his memory), from country to country, city to city (Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Tangiers and the soundstages of Cardington, England), with a mix of stylistic chutzpah and loony abandon that perhaps only a moviemaker with a budget in the two hundred million dollar range, and a writer-director (Nolan) married to his producer (Emma Thomas), could muster.

The result has already been subject to all the obvious movie comparisons: from The Matrix and James Bond shows, to Dreamscape and to Nolan’s previous chronology-fracturing or reality-twisting thrillers Memento, Following, Insomnia and The Prestige; from DiCaprio’s previous 2010 nightmare excursion Shutter Island, and to Minority Report, Total Recall, Impostor and other Phillip K. Dick-ian nightmare movie fables.

But Inception, a movie drunk on the magic of movies, goes further, it summons up hints and echoes of everything from La Jetee, Hiroshima mon Amour and The Italian Job, to Vertigo, and Kane. In the smash-up cross-cutting finale, it recalls the roaring, fugal climactic movement of D. W. Griffith’s great mad silent epic Intolerance. The film is full of grand flourishes. Hans Zimmer wrote the non-stop, bombastic but emotion-drenched score, which suggests Wagner at the Apollo; Edith Piaf, no less, sings under the credits her heart-twisting memoir/anthem of defiance “Non, Je ne Regrette rien” (“No Regrets”), which also threads though the entire movie.

This is a movie by a filmmaker who loves movies, and wants to explore that in an arena as endless and bewitching as that Escherian staircase (which seems to be going nowhere, then springs suddenly free). Inception is like a heist thriller fashioned Lewis Carroll-like and based on some three-dimensional chess game –or like a whole roller-coaster ride designed by Escher, a wild plunge that keeps dropping though one Phillip K. Dick-ian alternative reality-world after another, until finally it almost leaves us where we began (delirious, washed ashore on a beach, below towering crumbling cliffs) and then takes one more step.

It’s hard to synopsize any of this, because the whole movie is literally (and subliminally) one surprise and shocker after another.

Besides the inevitable, maybe planned, effect of seeing Incpetion and getting a little bewildered, is to want to see it again to clear up the confusion or to re-experience its delights, or possibly to gather evidence for a nasty debunking Kaelesque review. (Not once, but again, is the test of greatness. And maybe of a marketing strategy too.)

Still, it won’t hurt you to know that DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb is an American exile in Europe, and that he’s a highly paid, inwardly tormented specialist in the art and science of extraction. Extraction involves invading a human subject’s subconscious dream state to extract information — a process prized by corporations who want to steal ideas from each other. Inception damners and debunkers need go no further than that: Why in the world would anyone spend so much money and go to such perilous extremes (a process that may involve kidnapping, deception, endangerment and jail time) to steal an idea, when you might get the same results using the old fashioned methods of bribing an employee, hacking a computer, or hiring and wiring a hooker?

The answer is the same as you’d give to anyone who complains that John Ford’s marauding Stagecoach Apaches didn’t save their day by shooting the fleeing stagecoach’s horses. Why ruin a good story with too much damage from the people Alfred Hitchcock scornfully called The Plausibles?

Besides, why don’t they try riding after a stage and shooting a rifle at the same tiem? Plausibility be damned. We’re talking about a movie where people steal each other’s dreams and go in and out of each other’s heads, for God’s sake.

Anyway, Dom is hired, in our future and in the movie’s past, by the suave Japanese magnate Saito (Ken Watanabe of Tampopo) for a complex extraction job on a corporate rival. But Dom is asked this time to reverse his usual modus operandi: To implant an idea (or use inception) in the mind of a young corporate nabob-to-be, Robert (Bobby?) Fischer (Cillian Murphy), whose father, corporate head Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite) is dying.

To help, Dom assembles a team of old reliables (dead-serious right hand man Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and genial chemist-anesthesiologist, Yussef, played by Dileep Rao), old rivals (brashforger or impersonator Eames, played by Tom Hardy), and fresh faces (brainy architect Ariadne, played by that freshest of faces Ellen Page.)

Ariadne’s name, of course, is the same as that of the lady who helped the Theseus of Greek mythology thread his way in and out of the Labyrinth, and she helps introduce the other key plot element, besides being an invaluable angel of exposition. (Since she’s new to the game, Dom has to give her a crash course in everything you wanted to know about extraction and inception but were afraid to ask). Her key plot function? Ariadne, it seems, is also the protege of brilliant, compassionate professor Miles (played by Michael Caine, who maybe should be incepted into every noirish movie), and Miles is also the father of Dom’s tragic dead wife, Mal (played by Marion Cotillard, who also played Piaf).

SPOILER ALERT (SORT OF)
The tragedy of Mal’s death (she left their two children behind) is what has caused Dom’s exile, and her persistence (and the children’s) in his memory and dreams is what makes him a walking or dreaming time bomb.
END OF SPOILER

That’s the premise of the story, and you’ll understand why too much further synopization may be unwise or unwieldy. Perhaps we should remember, as Nolan and Caine once explained to us (in the deadly magician thriller The Prestige), that the three acts of a great magic trick are, in fact, the Pledge (where something ordinary is introduced), the Turning (where it turns into something extraordinary) and the Prestige (where whatever disappeared in the earlier acts reappears).

It’s hard to describe anything in Inception as the Pledge, because almost nothing is ordinary, which may be another forgivable flaw. And the whole last part of the movie is steeped in that incandescent succession of dreamlike exploding action scenes which finally pour into the three-strand intertwisting climax, where whatever disappears can’t always be trusted to reappear — but where it’s so damned entertaining, I never once thought of complaining. After all, Prestige isn’t everything.

Nolan seems fascinated by the idea of anti-chronological plots. (His Memento — a story told in reverse order, following a protagonist with short term amnesia — is a neo-noir of genius). He’s also soft on reconfigured genre tropes and standbys, with talismen (the spinning little top here whicb keeps reappearing), with sexy killers and villains, and, most disturbingly perhaps, with husbands who have destroyed, intentionally or not, their wives. (Perhaps Emma Thomas should remember this the next time they put a budget together.) In Inception, he revisits many old pets and odd obsessions and complicates them all. It’s not hard to see why this is a script that took him ten years or so to write, ever since Memento. (2001, wasn’t it?)

It’s rare to see a big Hollywood super-production for adults that’s this complex, this ambitious, this amusingly tricky and this this woundingly personal — or that has so much psychological layering and emotional resonance. (Why, it’s almost like a kid’s movie from Pixar!) I went to see Incepetion twice, both to clear up confusion and to re-experience its delights. And though the confusion may be dismissed as another marketing strategy, (if you can’t figure it out the first time, buy another ticket and go again), the fact is, I did enjoy it more.

One of the movie’s great plusses is the cast, especially DiCaprio. As he did in Scorsese’sShutter Island, one of Inception’s only artistic rivals among the big Hollywood movies this year (well, of course, there’s alsoToy Story 3), DiCaprio supplies this movie with a solid emotional center, anchoring a story that often seems in danger of flying off into zero-gravity FX limbo or devolving into some ersatz Phildickian dreamworld. Those tormented eyes, that quizzical half-grin, that deceptively boyish, slighty pinched matter-of-fact delivery of DiCaprio’s grounds the movie. Cottilard and Page help humanize Inception as well, and so of course, does Caine. And, in fact, so do all the others, in dreams or out.

They make the movie’s FX prestidigitation connect with us more. So does the interesting fact that Nolan uses mostly in-camera effects, except in stuff like the Escherite or trompe d’oleil fantasias where he needs CGI. (After all, the socialist French government won’t allow visiting Yank film companies to fold Paris streets in on themselves.) CGI, when used to create something in a supposedly real world, can be annoying. Here, with real-life objects and in-camera effeets used to create dreams and make them solid, the more occasional CGI arabesques flow in seamlessly.

That’s also why Inception deserves the high praise its gotten from most critics. I don’t mean to imply that this is some immaculateInception, or to infer too much of a comparison between Nolan’s film and a godhead movie like Citizen Kane (though Inception is obviously, the work of a Kane-savyy diretcor, as well as a Blade Runner-savvy one). But like Citizen Kane, Nolan’s new show is a movie that makes imaginative use of the zeitgeist and many of the tech magic tricks, devices and styles of its day (from Spielberg’s to Michael Bay’s), but bends them in trickier, deeper, more magical directions. It isn’t a movie that audiences love mostly for its characters and social ideas, like The Kids are Alright — even though the characters aren’t just along for the ride in Inception. Here, it’s the overall frame, design and style that are the main stunners.

In a way, the philosophical engineer of this train is writer Philip K. Dick, mentioned earlier, and who saturates this movie like real maple syrup on a hot pancake. Dick’s commercial heyday, ironically, came with Blade Runner (based on his fantastic novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) a movie released after Dick’s death. These days — though in life, Dick was an often impoverished pulp creator, dismissed as a hack by Establishment lit-types — producers seem ready to buy and film even his death certificate.

Dick was the master of alternative world stories (like “The Man in the High Castle,” still unfilmed) — though one of the best Dick-style novels may be “The Lathe of Heaven,” a Dick pastiche by his friend Ursula K. LeGuin. He also did stories about dreams within dreams and competing dreamers, including a terrific pulpy ’50s Ace paperback novel called “Eye in the Sky.” What makes Dick a great writer, and a great read, is the effortless, almost offhand way he creates those dream alternative worlds of his: step by step, brick by brick, talking about them as if they were already right here, all around us. That’s the approach Nolan often takes, very pungently and successfully.

There’s another level to Inception. In some ways, and maybe not even intentionally (or inceptionally) this is a movie about making movies — about conceiving them, painstakingly getting them put together (with help from corporate types), and then watching almost helplessly, as they finally unfold. Gordon-Levitt describes his character Arthur, the calm, clear-headed facilitator, as like a producer and DiCaprio’s mercurial Dom as like a writer-director. That they are. And Dom’s crew is like the movie’s company-crew. Nolan’s crucial collaborators: production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, special effects supervisor Cris Corbould, Zimmer, cinematographer Wally Pfister, editor Smith, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland. The dream invader’s henchmen? Of course. The film is a bit like an action movie blockbuster crossed with Fellini’s 8 ½ a movie about a movie that actually was made, despite everything.

When we watch films that plunge us into dreams or nightmares, or pull us into something like the dream state — movies like Kane, Vertigo orSingin’ in the Rain, Blade Runner, Beauty and the Beast, Sherlock, Jr. or Intolerrance — we’re getting the pleasures of the movies in a pure way, caught up in the flow, lost in the reverie, singing in the storm. Inception is in that category, maybe not as good, but often as compelling and hypnotic, and nearly as…memorable.

It’s also a movie that made me sad for a different reason. Almost forty years ago, in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union, in the heyday of the anti-Vietnam war era, a bad-tempered fellow student from a well-heeled family, who got into a fight with one of my friends (I pulled the assailant off and Union security intervened) went looking for us the next morning, with a crescent wrench and an ice pick in his bag. He found me in the Union Rathskellar, rushed up and send the wrench crashing down on the back of my head, fracturing my skull and coming within an eighth of inch of killing or paralyzing me.

I survived. But, over the decades, ever since then, I began losing the hearing in my left ear, and, even worse, I began losing my ability to remember my dreams. I still remember in detail, many that I had before the attack and some that I had afterward, but almost none that I have these days.

I know I still have dreams, because, very occasionally, I’m startled awake in the middle of one and I remember what seems a minute or two of the pure fantasy that happened just before the wake-up. Once I was jumping up in a theatre audience after suddenly remembering I was supposed to be in the very play I was watching. Once I was sliding down a crevasse, some place, somewhere. Once I was doing something or other with Julia Roberts. (A pretty good minute, that.). But all the rest is gone.

I miss my dreams. Maybe my mother is in some of them. So I’m actually very happy to see all the grand, complex, extravagant and thrilling fanastias, pretend-dreams and mementos that Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas and the others have put on the screen here, to shove or seduce into our heads.

The M. C. Esher staircase. The Paris street that folds over on itself. The zero gravity hotel corridor. The James Bondian snow battle. The express-train that comes suddenly out of nowhere. The lady Marion whom Leonard DiCaprio loves, standing on the ledge, about to jump. Edith Piaf. No regrets. The two little children, looking away. The van full of dreamers that keeps falling, falling, over a bridge and down toward the water below. The delirious survivor washed up on the beach, the waves crashing around him.

Inception forever, I say. For the most part, I’ll gve Nolan a temporary pass from Hitchcock’s Plausibles. After all, Nolan and all his crew give us plenty to dream on. And dreams are precious, never more so than when you’ve lost them.

– Michael Wilmington
July 8, 2010

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