Inception A

In IMAX, 148 minutes, Rated PG-13

With Inception Christopher Nolan proves he’s dreaming bigger than anyone else in Hollywood (I’m looking at you, Charlie Kaufman), and let there be no mistake, Inception is HUGE. From locations spanning Asia, India, Paris, London, and hybrids built from old James Bond video games; to a cast including Michael Caine, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (great here), Marion Cotillard, Ellen Paige, Tom Berenger, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, and Tom Hardy; to a multi-layered plot that plays with time, fate, the past, reality, and family; to special effects sequences and mind-bending action sets to make the Wachowski’s blush, Nolan’s colossus is built to stagger. And stagger it does, as much because he pulls it off (HE PULLS IT OFF) than from the sum of its elephantine parts. Still, a nagging question remains: is there a point to all this hubris and high-wire tomfoolery, or is this only (and it would be enough, honestly) mental masturbation for smarties and cinephiles? I’ll wager there are way bigger things here, but part of Nolan’s artfulness is that I’m not positive if he’s dealing with them or if this is a massive Rorschach test.

The Premise: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a freelance thief of intellectual property who breaks into people’s minds via their dreams (with the help of a sedative, a couple thin wires, another dream raider, and a computer in a briefcase) and tricks them into giving him their secrets. The trick is that Cobb must create a dream architecture (place, building) and invite the victim into his dreamed locale so that he can control what is going on within the dream. On particularly difficult cases DiCaprio creates a dream inside this initial dream, the point of which is to make particularly paranoid individuals that may be aware of the possibility of Cobb’s brand of thievery comfortable, thereby more likely to give up secrets. It is also theoretically possible, although never believed to have been successfully carried out, to go into someone’s dreams via the same process and imbed in their unconscious the seeds of an idea. The theory is that the victim will believe the idea to be their own original notion when they awake. This process is known as inception.

The Logistics: Time seems to move at a different pace while dreaming, so time in these dream states moves at about 1/60th (I think. Actually, I’m not sure about this number. The point is, much slower) the speed of the “real world”. Example, if a person is asleep for 4 hours, the thieves would have about 240 hours of dream time within which to extract the information. In a logical problem, in my opinion, within the film, in a dream within a dream, time slows down that much more again, meaning, in the above scenario, the second dream would last 14,400 hours (600 days). Much like in our dreams, things that happen in the outside world are often incorporated into the dream itself, including sounds and sensations. Furthermore, in a nifty nod to the common feeling of falling as we wake-up, the way to wake from a dream is by a “push”, or a scenario that would give the dreamers the sensation of falling. So, jumping off a building would allow the dream thieves to wake up. If a thief is several layers down, they must have a push at each layer, so they must wake-up from the second dream before they can wake from the first one. Finally, the thieves carry an object that only they know the physical properties of (weight, etc…) so that they can always know whether they are in the real world or in someone’s dream by handling this object (the idea is that the dream architect might be able to make a visual replica but wouldn’t know that it was hollow or was a loaded dice).

The Plot: Cobb has been forced into his illegal activity and to flee the States because his legitimate work with dreams came to an end when he was charged with crimes he claims not to have committed. His primary desire is to get back with his children in America. His now-dead wife Mal (the stunning Marion Cotillard, La vie en rose) continues to haunt Cobb within his dream states, showing up in any moment to wreck havoc. A client, Saito (Ken Watanabe, The Last Samari), claims he has the connections to get Cobb back to his children if he completes a successful inception. A team is assembled and a strategy is developed that will take them into three levels of dream to complete the inception. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned.

If that all seems confusing, it is, although I didn’t think it was as difficult to follow as some articles I’ve read indicate. The direction and editing here are spot on, with the cuts back and forth between three levels of dreams (and three cliff-hangers) working perfectly to increase suspense while allowing the audience to keep up. The action sequences, especially the one(s) done in weightlessness, are ingenious and groundbreaking while conforming to the rules of the world Nolan has created.

If there’s a flaw in this picture it’s that the main male characters, especially Cobb, aren’t that sympathetic. This should be no surprise. Nolan’s male characters generally aren’t. They tend to be strong men with some admirable characteristics that bend in high-pressure situations. Consider Memento, The Prestige, and even both Nolan’s Batmans. When the rubber meets the road, his male leads often put their own needs before justice or the good of the many. This isn’t as true of his Batman, but even then, his is dark knight is much darker than the other iterations. His women here are more sympathetic, especially Paige who does a fine job with a fairly one-dimensional character. But it’s Cotillard who brings heart and soul to this film. Her Mal is at turns wrathful, loving, broken-hearted, and jealous. She is, at least most of the time, a projection of Cobb, so she is how he remembers her or as he hopes or is scared she will be. It’s a role that would destroy a lesser actress, but illuminates Cotillard.

As often is the case with Nolan, he toys with religious categories and concepts while never taking a firm stance one way or the other. Here he toys with the concepts of limbo (in some Catholic thought, the outer limits of hell or the place where unbaptized infants go) and eternity. Furthermore the name “Cobb” is said to be an illusion to the Biblical patriarch Jacob, who meets God in a dream as angels ascend/descend a staircase (and from whom the nation of Israel takes their name). Further, Yosef (one of the team) is the Hebrew pronunciation Joseph, Jacob’s son and an interpreter of dreams in the book of Genesis.

There are a variety of themes explored, but the two that are most interesting and constant are parenthood and reality. Cobb will do anything to get back to his children, **SPOILER** even give up the memory of his wife, but why? Is it for them, as he claims, or for himself? And when did losing children, such a personal loss, become the driving force for so many films? In a dangerous and random world is the loss of our children our individual and collective greatest fear? But larger still, Nolan really wants to examine the questions that will mark the next half Century. In a time when we are painfully aware of our perspectivalism (the fact that we cannot escape having a perspective through which we filter reality) and increasingly aware that technology and chemistry leave us in a place where we can’t trust what we see or hear or even touch, how do we know what reality is ? and, maybe more to the point, if we have a choice, do we really want it anyway? If these films sound familiar to DiCaprio fans, it’s because they are similar to ones found in his Scorcese-directed Shutter Island from earlier this year. When a great filmmaker chooses to cover difficult themes, it’s good to sit-up and pay attention. When two as great as Nolan and Scorcese cover the same material six months apart, it’s imperative. The masterwork of a visionary. A