City blocks become city walls and city ceilings: One of the many visual wonders in "Inception."

(Christopher Nolan, 2010)

July 16, 2010

by Joel Crary

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) wakes up with a face full of surf. He’s prodded with a rifle and ultimately taken to sit at the table of an elder Japanese man named Saito (Ken Watanabe). They exchange cryptic words. Cobb spins a top. None of it makes a heck of a lot of sense. But since this is a Christopher Nolan film, it sinks in that figuring out these out-of-context sequences will be a slow treat. So-called art films often use alienating themes and formal decisions as a means of confronting the audience with the medium. In these early scenes of “Inception,” I waited on the brink of comprehension for a narrative flow to pull me in, and it arrived in the form of a collapsing structure.

Since “Following,” Nolan has played excessively and skilfully with timelines populated by the nonsensical. Even the “Batman” films contained brief moments of unexplained poetry that eventually allowed Bruce Wayne’s character arcs to snap into place. In “Inception,” the jilted timelines become expressions of severe mania. Like Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” ever-obsessively turning in on itself, the film becomes a labyrinth in which Nolan pushes his characters toward the centre, all the while directing our attention back to the breadcrumbs, assuring us that there’s a way out.

“Inception” posits that a non-existent technology allows people to enter the mind of a person as that person dreams. How such a technology came to be isn’t addressed; like the memory erasure device in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” we’re asked to accept that it exists without tugging too much at the sleeve of the film. I’m fine with that. As is, “Inception” contains a ton of dialogue about how entering a dream works (a subject is put to sleep and a “team” enters their mind via a machine that connects them like spokes to a hub), how the landscape in a dream can be manipulated, and what role the subconscious has in all of it.

That last one is pretty interesting. Subconscious projections of people who populate a dream shoot disdainful looks at dream modifiers. (“They behave like white blood cells fighting off an infection.”) Make too many changes to a person’s head space and they’ll outright attack you. There’s also talk of a limbo level of the subconscious, where the dreamer becomes so entrenched in the dream that they wake up in a vegetative state while in the dream world their conscious perceptions are tossed elsewhere. I pictured some circle of Hell out of Dante where our memories batter us in a whirlwind of perpetual non-living.

Ironically, it’s the labyrinthine structure of “Inception” that keeps it from wading too far into too-weird territory. The team sets up multiple dream-within-a-dream scenarios until some characters are existing on five planes of being at the same time. Then the breadcrumbs kick in, as Nolan keeps returning to previous planes to remind us how these people are going to wake up. The further into a dream-within-a-dream a person goes, the more time slows down closer to reality. It’s that principle of hitting the snooze button and experiencing hours worth of dream time even though 10 minutes have passed, brought to life in complex, effect-driven mayhem.

Appropriate enough for a film about dreaming, this is a dream cast. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur, Cobb’s chief cohort and beat partner, sharp and efficient. Tom Hardy plays Eames, who has learned the craft of shape-shifting within dreams simply by changing mannerisms. Ellen Page is the new recruit, an architect with the right instincts concerning how much of the subconscious goes into putting a building together. “Drag Me to Hell”’s Dileep Rao is the man with the chemical solutions, and Lukas Haas and Michael Caine also make gratifying if brief appearances.

Marion Cotillard is Mal, Cobb’s deceased wife. Charges have been laid that implicate Cobb in her death. Now only able to dream like a junkie for sleep, Cobb stores memories of Mal in his mind as though they are floors of an apartment building, and there’s a gradual reveal about exactly what he keeps in the basement. Mal keeps sticking her nose in Cobb’s work, turning up at inopportune times as a manifestation of his guilt. The effects team provides a striking look at a dream world that Mal and Cobb had constructed for themselves, where childhood homes and places plucked from memory are lined up one after the other, small shrines surrounded by enormous skyscrapers.

Saito cuts a deal with Cobb: Enter the head of a young executive (Cillian Murphy). Implant the idea of shutting down his father’s corporation, and he’ll see to it that the charges against Cobb are dropped, allowing Cobb to return to his children. It makes sense that those with money would use such a technology to gain an advantage over others with money. Indeed, “reality” in “Inception” is dictated insofar as capitalism allows its characters to understand it or, in some cases, remember it. The act of putting an idea in someone’s dream is where the film’s title originates – about as tricky as it sounds, but the team is made of old hands. Their experiments and theories may amount to a lot of hot air, but I bought the pretension because the concept was so intriguing, and Nolan pulls it off with exciting visuals that turn the film inside out.

Some may, accurately, find “Inception” an often bewildering experience. It questions the nature of reality and doesn’t try to provide all the answers, and that may prove aggravating. But questions are what give birth to films like these, so rare in the modern pop movie landscape. Much of Ingmar Bergman’s work was formed out of existential crises and the inability of the human mind to understand the soul. Rare filmmakers like Nolan are able to tap into the dark areas of the human psyche that cannot be addressed through classic narrative structures and pull out truth. Nolan happens to have the budget to join the truth with dazzling special effects. “Inception” may apply all the right bells and whistles of the blockbuster season, but it’s also the one of the most refreshing, and expensive, art films of recent memory.