Inception

It really takes quite a bit to get me engaged anymore. The older I get, the less patience I have for offerings afforded by the media, fictional or otherwise. It's not just for films. When you observe the same tired patterns in human actions, history repeating itself, thought processes stuck in neutral, it gets old. Hollywood gossip. Celebrity behavior. Actually, Hollywood and Washington are becoming less dissimilar all the time. This is why my interest in politics, for example, has all but evaporated. It never changes. The same partisan bickering, the same bureaucratic breakdowns, the same compromises, the same vitriol. As a society, we seem more interested in being divided and close-minded and insular than looking for solutions. This discussion is a whole other ball of wax, but it fits here, I think. I'm still monitoring things in the news, to be aware of the insanity, but it's becoming like a daily (and, yes, necessary) dose of a vitamin that, at best, tastes like vanilla and at worst, smells like raw sewage. I need dynamics, progression in what I take in. All else is masochism, and a sweet waste of time.

For this reason, even watching sports has become tedious. While one can marvel at the occasional feat that breaks a record (or even the laws of physics[this is relevent to this movie, hold on!]), ooh and ahh at the heroicism of the athlete, mostly it's just the same damn thing to me. How many times can I get my blood pressure up over an interception or double play or goal? Seen it all before. Hard to get excited anymore, even with sudden death playoffs and the like. This is why the arts and science are my favorite subjects. There is potential for something new, not just the same old scenarios. There are Possibilities of new ground being broken, new neural pathways to be forged.

But art also can become stagnant, especially in Hollywood. The continuing rash of remakes of old television programs and films are clear testament to that. Imagination, thought in general, seems to be in want. For every Breaking Bad or Mad Men, two uncommonly good contemporary entertainments, there a dozen DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS or Rookie Blues or virtually any reality show. Big scale Hollywood effects films have also become increasingly dull; it seems with each million spent, the yawns became more frequent for me. As much as I admire director Christopher Nolan, whose films have challenged me, fascinated me, and sometimes knocked me out, I watched the INCEPTION trailers with weary eyes. It reeked of another loud, over-the-top orgy of destruction and half-baked philosophy and metaphysics. The world certainly didn't need another MATRIX clone.

After being wildly entertained for a very quick seeming 2 and 1/2 hours yesterday, I can happily state the Nolan is one of the few exceptions in Tinseltown. Mega budgets have not dulled his creativity. After all, Aronofsky had a non-existent budget and created Pi! But, having the $$$ at his disposal has actually allowed a full bloom realization of a script Nolan had been tinkering for about a decade. While INCEPTION is not perfect, it is an exemplary entry in the sci-fi genre. I was dazzled and intrigued like crazy.

A lot of ink has already been spilled over this film, which, at the time of this writing, seems to be another blockbuster for Nolan. It is a complex brain teaser that has been fitted as a caper/heist pic, presumably to make the film easier to digest and follow. You might say it's OCEAN'S 11 meets PRIMER or eXistenZ, odd as that sounds. INCEPTION actually has elements of many films, including ones as diverse as ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and HEAT, all of which apparently saturated Nolan's cranium from years of film obsession. Rather than feeling like rip-offs or gratuitous or clumsy homages, these inspirations (or, er, "projections", for those of you reading who've see this movie) are ingenious backdrops. INCEPTION, distilled to its most bare bones plot synopsis, is about various experts who can enter others' dreams to extract or plant ("incept") ideas. Ideas, as the characters state more than once, eventually define you. You might imagine that the corporate world would be very interested in such skills.

To wit, a mogul named Saito (Ken Watanabe) recruits Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former dream architect who leads teams literally into subjects' dreams via sophisticated equipment to find information locked into the subconscious. Saito himself plays subject to audition Dom and co., to see how effective they are. The audition is a disaster, but the CEO nonethless seeks Dom's employ, but instead of extracting info, he wants to incept a thought into a rival's brain. The rival is a guy named Fischer, who has just assumed the mantle of his deceased father's company. Saito seeks to have the dream team germinate an idea in Fisher's head: break up the company. Fisher will thus become less of a marketplace threat.

I mentioned that Dom is a "former" dream architect (someone who creates the intricately detailed dreamscape in which the team carries out their heists) because he's having a few difficulties which compromise his work. Namely, his obsession with his deceased wife often distracts and sabotogues the task at hand. She'll show up and wreak havoc, including even killing someone (at which point the dreamer either awakens or goes deeper into a dream limbo) or otherwise disengage the directive. The backstory of Dom and Mal (Marion Catillard) is somewhat involved and poignant. As the film progresses, we learn that the couple spent a lifetime in the deepest levels of dreamstate, and upon returning to reality, well, that's where it got sticky. Mal lost all sense of reality for various reasons, and it leads to tragedy. That horrible event, as well as all the other moments in their courtship, are replayed as Dom hooks himself up with the dream equipment every night to do experiments. His 2 young children also figure prominently into this scenario, yet another element of INCEPTION that recalls DiCaprio's earlier head bender, SHUTTER ISLAND.

A college student named Ariadne (Ellen Page) discovers what Dom is doing. She is recruited as a replacement architect for the aforementioned new assignment, and her sense of the three dimensional, the possibilities of the dream world, provides some of the movie's trippiest and best moments. She is clearly the genius for this job. Dom teaches her the rules (such as they are) about dreamscapes and why anonymous passersby in these dreams may suddenly turn hostile. She'll, in the process, also discover how unstable Dom really is, and how his demons can be catastrophic for all concerned, including other dream team members Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who does research on the dreamer subjects; Eams(Tom Hardy), a mildly eccentric "forger" who can assume various appearances within the dreams, and Yousep (Dileep Rao), the chemist who concocts a tranquilizer that works long enough for the team to carry out their business.

The whole notion of time is vital to the plot of INCEPTION. We learn that one minute in the real world equals several in the first dream layer. As you go deeper, that number multiplies. I would have loved to have been present for the script conferences on this movie. I can imagine the heady discussions and arguments, how to keep everything straight and (somewhat) logically airtight. This film had to have been a nightmare for the continuity department.

A growing consensus regarding INCEPTION is that for all of its brilliance, cleverness, and excitement, it ultimately leaves one cold. We don't get a real emotional connection, the critics write. As well, the protagonists are amoral, no one to root for. I don't really agree. I would've liked more development of Dom's relationship with Mal, as what we do see sometimes comes off a bit dramatic and theatrical. There are moments when we do get right there and feel their pain; DiCaprio and Cotillard do their best. We never see Mal's life, her personality before her consciousness is turned inside out, never know how she was. There would be higher emotional stakes if we had, in my opinion.

That last point led one critic to state that INCEPTION was "too busy being awesome to be great". I agree that many of the "great" films are about people, fleshed out individuals we grow to care about. But I think of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, as I'm sure Nolan did as well. I consider it a great film about ideas. We do learn a bit about Dave Bowman, but it's not about him; it's about no less than mankind. Kubrick's characters were dehumanized at various points, not always developed the way Stella Adler or Lee Strasburg might've liked. Perhaps ideas enough do not make a film great, but to dismiss INCEPTION because it is bereft of emotion is hasty. Do I consider Nolan's movie "great"? Maybe not in that film snob way I praise IKURU and THE RED SHOES, but you've heard about those apples and oranges, yes?

As for our "heroes", I am far more interested in flawed, complicated souls than white hatted do-gooders. The entire mission of this team is essentially in the name of corporate espionage. As timely as ever! But never fear, dear viewer, the better of human nature is victorious towards the end. At its core, INCEPTION is somewhat warm, human, not cold or cynical at all. And the debate over whether that top keeps spinning in the final scene, I believe, will rage through Starbucks franchises worldwide for years to come.