Inception

"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling"  Eames from Inception.

Inception, released during the summer of 2010, is director Christopher Nolan’s first mega-budgeted non Batman film, funded by a presumably ecstatic Warner Brothers after the overwhelming success of The Dark Knight which came out two years earlier.  Nolan’s second Caped Crusader film grossed so more than expected that Warner Brother delayed the planned November 2008 release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince to July 2009.  Harry Potter fans were angered though as an only casual watcher of the Harry Potter series I was indifferent. 

Spoilers for Inception below:

From both a visual and structural standpoint Inception seems influenced by The Matrix.  I always felt the latter film’s attempts to be cool worked against the confusing plot dynamics.  Nolan and his editor, Lee Smith are much more successful in telling their stories using multiple and sometimes narratives, where time itself is often a character.  Each of Inception’s four dream levels has its own time rules, which plays right into their interests.  As with Interstellar, the film is clearly set in the near future but the year is never stated and apart from the dream technology everything else (fashion, cars, etc.) seems much the same as now.  Therefore, the audience can focus on the plot which though complicated, is not impossible to follow if you continue to pay attention.   

Nolan, who scripted Inception, presents it as a futuristic heist film in which everyone on a team has a specific function.  This decision makes the film more fun than a drama exploring the same idea might have been.  The team induces people to sleep and then enter their mark’s dreams to extract secrets as an act of corporate espionage.  In this story the team is hired to commit inception, which is to take it up another notch and plant an idea in a subject’s head.  Often in a film like this perhaps someone like the Michael Caine character might have taken care of the exposition but here the team itself does so and as they are in the adventure it allows the audience to keep up.  The main character, Dominick Cobb, is played by Leonardo DiCaprio who seems deliberately made up to look like Nolan.  DiCaprio is very good at playing tortured characters who excel at their professions.  Cobb is guilt ridden over the death of his wife, Mal, who committed suicide and framed Cobb for her murder due to an instability he inadvertently helped create, when he manipulated her mind to get her to leave Limbo, a deep level of dreaming.  Cobb is helped not in the least by the fact that his wife turns up so often in his dreams to sabotage the team’s goals.  This tragedy has a double impact as Cobb is separated from his children and his goal is to be able to reunite with them in the U.S. and come to terms with what happened to Mal.

Mal, (the French word for “bad”) is played by Marion Cotillard in a complex role.  As Mal is often an antagonistic force in Cobb’s dreams we in the audience need to be uneasy every time she shows up.  Yet we also must see the connection between Mal and Cobb and Cotillard pulls this off beautifully.  Cotillard gets to show both sides in a scene in which Ariadne snoops on Cobb’s dream and Mal, who is having a warm moment with Cobb, spots Ariadne and her expression changes slightly but chillingly.  Christopher Nolan hired Cotillard again for key role in his next film, The Dark Knight Rises, as he also did with Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt.

I had first noticed Joseph Gordon Levitt the previous year as the male lead in the offbeat romance 500 Days of Summer.  His cool performance as Arthur, who works as Cobb’s logistics person, showed me his versatility.  Gordon-Levitt’s standout scene is the fight in the rotating hallway in which the interesting visual works in perfect conjunction with the car that is in the middle of a roll.  The only negative factor is that Arthur is sidelined from much of the rest of the film afterwards since he is on Level 2.   

Ellen Page is Ariadne, who is based on a mythical character who helped a hero navigate a maze, hinted at when Cobb has Ariadne draw a maze.  Ariadne is recruited to the team when Cobb needs a new architect after he realizes that Mal’s presence is hurting the missions.  It would be easy to have Ariadne seem naive since she is just learning about this world but Nolan and Page ensure she is never overwhelmed and comes to serve as Cobb’s conscience and even has the idea of going to the forbidden Limbo after Fisher is killed.  Wisely Nolan does not try to create a romance between her and Cobb as that would have rang false.

Tom Hardy brings a lot of charisma to the forger Eames (he can create an image of a person and then impersonate him or her in the subject’s dreams) capped off by the memorable quote at the top of this piece at a moment in which he teases Arthur who is much more rigid.  Ken Watanabe plays Saito, a business magnate who holds the power to remove Cobb’s legal troubles if Cobb’s team can implant an idea in the head of Robert Fisher played by Cillian Murphy, to break up the company he has just inherited.  Murphy, who is so different as Scarecrow in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, looks comfortable as the privileged Fisher who wears expensive suits and is constantly on his Blackberry.  Although Fisher is the mark in the film he also consistently adjusts to his situation.  There is one detail that I could not quite believe though.  Fisher never recognizes Saito in his dreams.  If Saito is able to buy an airline he must be one of the richest people in the world and thus his face would be well known, especially to one of his chief business rivals. 

The detail that makes the entire dynamic work is the idea of dream sharing.  This allows the characters to interact with each other on multiple levels and while both asleep and awake without having to inform each other what is happening which keeps the story propelling forward.  Another film that I love a lot with dreams at its core is Vanilla Sky, but only one character is dreaming in that film.

Another idea that works well is the idea that in the second half of the film devoted to the inception, a character stays on each level and Nolan gets to play with his time toys by having each level interrelated.   For that reason Cobb is able to spend 50 years with Mal in Limbo and apparently only a short time has passed since they went in.  Then when Cobb finds Saito in Limbo another 40 or so years has passed (though Cobb still appears the same, perhaps the earlier scene with Mal took up a lot of Saito’s time).  But when they wake up the 11 hour flight they were on is only just ending.

The film is set all over the world and has many memorable visuals, developed with cinematographer Wally Pfister.  There is a key sequence in Paris where the streets fold, the aforementioned rotating hallway fight, the unpopulated Limbo City which has buildings from many periods and has been built by Cobb and Mal, and a base on a snowy mountain which looks inspired by Piz Gloria from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

We all have dreams in which loved ones who are lost revisit us.  The film makes extensive use of this by  showing Mal as a vision of Cobb’s subconscious which leads to the theme of the film is giving up those who have left.  Cobb’s connection with Mal keeps him away from his kids, and any sense of family life they may have had before.  When Cobb finally accepts his loss by letting go of his memory of Mal he is able to go home and start rebuilding his life with his children.

Despite much discussion all the evidence I have seen in the film suggests that Cobb is not dreaming at the end of the film.   Interestingly it is presented in a dreamlike state as everything seems a little slower, a lot of the ancillary sound is turned off, Hans Zimmer’s “Time” cue is played legato but I took that as the film slowing down after reaching its goal and allowing the characters to recover from their exhausting adventure.  But Cobb is on the plane which he was on while awake.  The quiet behavior by the other characters is fitting after such an intense experience in the dreams.  Also Michael Caine appears and he was not in any of the dreams.  The final scene in Face Off is played with a similar rhythm and also has an earned warm family reunion.

There are a few flaws:

Nolan’s films have a lot of deceased spouses and it starts to feel a little like a trope here.  Memento, The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar all have widowed leading men.  Also the death of Harvey Dent’s girlfriend in The Dark Knight ends up turning him into villainous Two Face.  I have not seen Tenet yet so am not sure if that film contains one.  In Memento, and The Prestige as well as Inception the hero’s inability to move on from his late wife’s death traps him in a cycle.  Nolan’s wife Emma Thomas produces his films so presumably she is ok with this repeated motif. 

On first viewing I did not recognize that Michael Caine plays Cobb’s father-in-law.  It seems he is no longer with his wife who is taking care of the kids in California while Caine’s character is in Paris.  I would presume that Mal was raised in Paris if her father teaches there which would explain Cotillard’s casting but the film could have clarified this.

The rules of the film are laid out repeatedly but then changed as the plot requires it.  We are told and shown that killing a character would wake him or her up but then later are told that only after they are in the dream that if they are under heavy sedation it would not work.

The plan for the inception is cleverly laid out but goes awry almost immediately

Would a character feel rested after waking up even after being so active in this dream?

Why do Cobb and Mal leave their young children for so long?  Even if it is only several hours in real time if they aged 50 years in Limbo then they would have perceived that.  Cobb is presented as a tragic figure for having been both widowed and forced to leave his kids but he quite voluntarily did the latter earlier.  Not many parents I know would spend 50 days apart from theirs.  Also, the film hints that they aged, showing shots of them as an elderly couple of but when they lie down on the tracks they look like they do in the rest of the film. 

How does Cobb find Saito and why does he not age since Saito has? 

I think the film has more gunfire than it needs.  Every level except the last one has a big action set piece, and the antagonists are often faceless projections.   In this case Nolan did not need to dream bigger.

All in all Inception is excellent entertainment and one of Nolan’s better films.  ****