The only thing I knew about Inception for sure, based on its vague, yet intriguing ad campaign, was that its subject matter was dreams, and a bit more specifically, people who could navigate the dreamscapes of others. The process behind the MacGuffin isn’t explained, it isn’t some sort of new technology or an ancient Buddhist meditation secret that allows the film’s principle characters to enter and manipulate dreams; we’re just plunged right in and asked to accept that this has always been what these characters are up to. I liked that. In a film already bogged down a bit by expositional setups of its rules and puzzles, things could have got a bit boring with many more explanations as to what makes this sort of dream invasion possible. I prefer to just pretend that it’s the logical next step for the surviving characters in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and move on. But more to the point, Inception is definitely a film preoccupied not with just the adventurous premise of being able to enter a fictional dreamworld, but also with exploring the shared experience of dreaming in the real world. When talking with others about their dreams, there’s a list of common experiences that most everyone has felt; the shifting settings, people appearing as others instead of themselves, the feeling of weightlessness, being snapped awake by a sense of falling, the inability to remember how a dream started. Writer/director Christopher Nolan incorporates all of these common dream elements into the world of his film, sets up rules and reasonings around them, and uses our shared fascination with the content of our dreams to craft an equally fascinating story.
Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is largely credited for being the first to introduce the often used plotline of a disparate group of individuals coming together as a team and performing some sort of impossible task. That seminal story, of a team of samurais coming together to protect a village from an insurmountably large amount of invading bandits and thieves is one that has been borrowed from time and time again over film history. It’s been used in action films like Robert Aldrich’s beloved World War II drama The Dirty Dozen. Pretty much the entire heist film genre relies on this plot structure, from a classic like The Asphalt Jungle to the most popular modern entries into the genre like Soderbergh’s remake and sequels to Ocean’s 11. Even George Lucas, the undisputed king of sci-fi/fantasy borrowed heavily from the trope in his Star Wars films. His rag tag group of rebels banded together to take down an unstoppable empire. In each film they were thrust together, bonded as a unit, and then were forced to break apart to fight on multiple fronts, but toward the same goal. What plagued some of those films, the modern prequels especially, is that one or two of the plotlines were less interesting than the others. One of the threads seemed less important when compared to everything else going on. It couldn’t help but feel like a let down when you would go from the iconic three way light saber battle to Jar Jar Binks stumbling into fart jokes while watching The Phantom Menace. Inception, while following a similar structure, doesn’t fall into that trap. By making you care about all of it’s characters and by making sure that every disparate plot thread is as equally important to the film’s climax than the next, Nolan’s film is able to create a roller coaster ride that doesn’t end until he pulls the switch. Inception, in fact, may be the most intricately plotted film of all time. In a summer of blockbuster films that owe their very DNA to seminal pictures like Seven Samurai, cheesy, studio schlock like The Losers and The A-Team have fallen by the wayside with little fanfare or recognition while Inception, a film that doesn’t easily fit into this genre at first glance, has made both waves and dollars by being a high quality dip into the team-up trope pool.
One of the earliest and most successful true summer tent pole films was what I consider to be, far and away, Stephen Spielberg’s greatest accomplishment of all time; Raiders of the Lost Ark. Raiders, while once again stemming from the groundwork laid by things that came before it (this time from the pulp serials of George Lucas’ childhood), still managed to rise above its source material and become an iconic and inspirational piece of adventure film just on the force of it’s own charm alone. It has a lot in common with the James Bond franchise. Both are world traveling, both feature cocksure, egotistical heroes; but despite the fact that Bond has many more films under it’s umbrella, none of it’s entries were ever quite able to have the staying power or impact that Raiders mustered up. Even with a couple of inferior sequels, Indiana Jones remains my quintessential adventure film hero. A large part of the fun of these films is the constantly changing scenery. From London, to Egypt, to the middle of a rainforest, adventure films always keep us moving and keep us engaged. They work both as action packed thrillers and eye-popping travelogues. Inception borrows a lot from the adventure films that have come before it. Never sitting still for a second, the marauding member’s of Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) team hop all over both the actual globe and dreamlike recreations of it to fulfill the objectives of their mission. From a fairy-tale version of Japan, to an academic campus in Paris, to a seedy bar in the Middle East that is something right out of Indy’s own adventures, this film never lets up with the scene changes or action set pieces. A late scene set during an assault on a heavily guarded and heavily snow covered mountain compound is something right out of Mr. Bond’s greatest tales. There’s gunplay, high-speed chases, hand-to-hand combat; you name it, and every film of Nolan’s I see brings him closer and closer to being a great action director. While his fight scenes were murky and choppily edited in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight ramped up the quality of the action immensely by borrowing a visual and sound design style from Michael Mann’s career defining work with Heat. Nolan continues mining that inspiration here by creating taught, intense, easy to follow, and sonically bombastic action sequences that pepper the philosophizing of the film just enough to keep it from becoming a talking heads, hard sci-fi snooze fest. What we’re dealing with here, while a bit headier than what we’ve been getting for our summer faire, is pure popcorn movie good times.
That headiness, that philosophizing; we’re deeper in it here than we have been since the first Matrix film. And as you watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt engage in weightless, slow motion kung fu it becomes near impossible to not flash back to glimpses of the first time that you experienced the world bending action sequences of The Matrix. Unlike many of the copycats that we were bombarded with after its huge success, The Matrix didn’t confront us with impossibly stylized action sequences just for the hell of it. It built it’s own world where things like flying and bullet time could be possible. It gave us the rules of how these things worked and stuck to them. It was this crafting of sci-fi cannon, this interesting to watch construction of a world that differed from our own, that drew people in to that film; not just the cool fight visuals on their own. It’s this level of mixing outrageous fantasy with plausible explanation that helps audiences suspend their disbelief and go along for a crazy ride. It’s what gets them talking about and analyzing the film after they leave the theater. This is something that not many action films, including the ill-conceived Matrix sequels, have been able to recreate until now. Inception’s dream world and all of the new laws and logic that come along with it is just as interesting as the computer world introduced in that first Matrix film. And as we get deeper and deeper into the exploration of what’s possible in this dream world, the characters start to become so enamored wit the possibilities that Nolan has laid out that they begin to lose their grip on reality. As a viewer, snippets of memories from The Matrix start to blend with images of scenes that you remember from Total Recall. The dream-like experience of watching Inception just keeps chugging along with questions of what is real and what is a dream. What is the fundamental difference between dream and reality for that matter? If something can be perceived, doesn’t that make it just as real as anything else? As Cobb and his crew of dream warriors go deeper and deeper into subconscious, further and further into dreams within dreams, more and more images from his past begin to intrude on the proceedings. You flash back to Schwarzenegger on Mars. Do the people he’s meeting really exist, or are they simply creations that he ordered implanted into his brain? Has he really gone to Mars, or is he still unconscious in a lab chair? DiCaprio’s character, very effectively and very intriguingly goes through similar experiences. Before we know it our nice little action plot has swirled around with intimate memories of Cobb’s marriage to create some kind of new movie soup. Suddenly our experience watching the film begins to blend with our experience of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. We think back to Jim Carrey’s character in that film navigating his memories much the way that Cobb does here. We remember him desperately trying to cling to his erasing past, much the same way that Cobb clings to the dying memories of his marriage.
I’ve talked a bit about the character of Cobb, but I haven’t spoke much about who he is, who his teammates are, and how effectively they are portrayed by the actors. Cobb is a professional, he’s highly trained, he has his methods down, he tells us that he’s the best there is at what he does. And yet, he’s also a man losing control. His haunted past is intruding upon his work, effecting it’s results, making him a danger to himself and everyone around him. While watching DiCaprio work in the role I was drifting back to his other, most recent role, that of Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island. Both are confident, competent men, but both are thrust into worlds where they don’t know what is real and what is imagined. DiCaprio plays them in a similar manner, but while Daniels was a bit more stalwart, here he also mixes in a little of the down the rabbit hole insanity that I remembered from his slow burn decent into madness films The Aviator and The Beach. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Cobb’s right hand man Arthur. He isn’t the most defined of characters, and he’s written as a sort of mini Cobb clone, but Gordon-Levitt does a good job adding weight and charm to the role. I was most reminded of his work in the neo-noir Brick, the first film I saw him in where I believed him as something more than the weasely teenager. Both there and here he is believable as the together adult, and even the physical badass. Tom Hardy isn’t an actor I’ve been aware of for long, but after seeing him in 2008’s Bronson, I knew I would have my eye on everything he did from that point forward. Here, as the dream forger Eames, Hardy is able to call upon some of the manic charisma that made Bronson such a memorable character and performance, while still staying in the confines of a less broad, more utilitarian side character. Often, little moments with Eames stood out as my favorites of the entire film, and that wouldn’t have been possible without an actor as fun as Hardy playing the role. Michael Caine makes a brief appearance as Cobb’s former mentor, and while he isn’t given much screen time or much to do, he draws upon the performances we’ve already seen from him, especially the mentor and surrogate father roles that he’s played in Nolan’s Batman franchise and The Prestige, to give the role added authority. The sole acting disappointment for me in this film came from Ellen Page’s role as Ariadne, the dream architect. The character works largely as our introduction into the world of shared dreaming, she’s the new member of the crew, and subsequently she is the window through which we have much of the world explained to us; and that expository nature of the character is probably a large part of why I found it rather boring, but Page did little to elevate the material. Her Ariadne was largely blank faced and emotionless. I got no glimpse of that visceral animal that leaked out of her in Hard Candy, no flashback to the irritating, though memorable charisma that she showed off in Juno. If given a choice of current art film, it girl actresses, I would have been much happier seeing what Carey Mulligan could have done with the role. While the character could have been more interestingly written, Page was not the right choice to try and bring the architect alive.
