Christopher Nolan (2010)
Inception is a mind-altering cinematic experience which gets you asking questions about the reality of your existence. I kept wondering how I could be devoting 148 minutes of what’s left of my life to watching it. My feelings about the film don’t approach dislike or hostility because the experience of watching it is mostly stupefying: the point came when I was thinking, as I tried to find something to think about, that my idea of loving cinema was only a dream. Of course I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on although, after reading the plot synopsis in Sight and Sound when I got home, I don’t see that I missed much. Because everything is so monotonously unreal, Inception is weightless: in spite of the crunching power of the digital sound, often used to score moments of lethal mayhem, I found the violence inoffensive. And however dire or threatening the outlook got, I was never fearful of what might happen – even when Marion Cotillard, high up in a skyscraper, prepared to throw herself from a window ledge – because anything that happened would bring Inception closer to its end.
What I’ll remember more than the picture was the interview with Leonardo DiCaprio in the ‘On the red carpet’ commercial that’s currently a standard item on the Odeon’s menu of adverts. Asked if he was excited by the script for Inception when it was offered to him, DiCaprio says (something like):
‘Yeah … when I saw Chris Nolan’s script – when I saw he wanted to do something spectacular and cerebral and existential, and about travelling to four levels of the sub-conscious, I thought I wanna be a part of that …’
You have to hand it to DiCaprio – he’s good at remembering his lines. What’s so dispiriting about Inception is that many people will come out of the cinema not only having been entertained (incredible to me, but fair enough) but pleased with themselves that they’ve been communicating with their cerebral, existential etc side.
Inception is a massive commercial hit and a major critical one – a relief to find David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek among the dissenters. This is because it thinks – and is clearly able to persuade others that – it looks like a masterpiece and talks like one too. The movie takes itself very seriously indeed: I’m no expert on the genre but I would bet there’s less playfulness here than in your average technically ground-breaking masterpiece. Zacharek rightly points out that the film carries a load of script and that it has to because Nolan’s visuals, for all the technical brilliance of their construction and execution (Inception, like Nolan’s The Dark Knight, is photographed by Wally Pfister and edited by Lee Smith), do nothing to impart themes or information. People keep explaining to each other that X isn’t real but only a projection of Y’s mind and drone on about their respective ‘realities’. Yet however far or deep into the unconscious the team of dream extractors and/or inceptors go, they always seem to exist (or be represented) in the same world – and this is why Inception is not only numbing but alarming. The idea that every conceivable type of mental experience might be situated in the realm of expensive, technological, soul-destroying Hollywood film-making is the subject for a horror classic.
Nolan’s casting of the team of dream-weavers is remarkable. He’s assembled around Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays someone called Dom Cobb, a group of actors most of whose performances are as dull as the main man’s. The obvious exception is Joseph Gordon-Levitt who, while occasionally suggesting a cutout of Heath Ledger, has a sly charm that the boringness of his role as Cobb’s sidekick Arthur can’t obscure. Tom Hardy is Eames (Nolan has a gift for uninteresting surnames): according to the Wikipedia synopsis, he is ‘a forger who can change his appearance inside dreams’ but Hardy, although at first he has the disquieting substance of a real person, can’t find any variety in his character (which isn’t really the word for what he’s asked to play). I hoped Ken Watanabe might be a bit more colourful than he is as Cobb’s boss Saito, who wants to protect his business interests by getting the team to plant in the mind of a dying corporate rival’s son and heir (although he never got on with his dad and there’s some stuff about changing wills) the idea of breaking up the father’s empire. Cillian Murphy plays the inceptee Robert Fischer with such obvious, calculated emotionality that he’s almost (but not quite) fascinating: he’s certainly utterly unappealing, especially in his reconciliation scene with Fischer père (Pete Postlethwaite, who keeps his dignity in a bedridden cameo). Tom Berenger, who hasn’t been seen much in recent years, won’t be making a comeback on the strength of his wooden effort as Robert Fischer’s uncle. Dileep Rao was a scientist in Avatar and a chemist here, which is probably enough said. Michael Caine takes things easy as Cobb’s father (or father-in-law?): given what’s going on around him, this is, for a change, a relief.
As in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a troubled mind with a guilty secret about his wife and children. (The latter’s faces are hidden from us until the final scene – for some reason, I kept imagining that, when they turned to the camera, they would both have the faces of Brad Pitt as the geriatric Benjamin Button. In the event, the beatific grins of the little girl and boy make them spookily unreal – I wasn’t sure if this was intended or not.) In spite of his formidable seriousness on the red carpet, DiCaprio actually seems relatively relaxed in this role, perhaps because the pressure of being a convincing human being has been removed. I’ll leave it at that. I’ve only been doing these notes for a couple of years and I’m already tired not just of watching Leonardo DiCaprio but even of slagging him off.
There are only two women to speak of: Cobb’s wife Mal (French for evil – and she’s played by a French actress); and Ariadne, a tyro ‘dream world’ architect – the sci-fi equivalent of her classical Greek namesake. (Nolan also favours obvious forenames.) This is the third big, bad picture running in which Marion Cotillard, according to many reviewers, gives the best performance: I didn’t stay around for enough of Public Enemies to know and it was just about true of Nine but this hat-trick suggests that Cotillard is being damned with faint praise routinely (although that’s a change from too much praise, which she got for La vie en rose). As Cobb’s doomed wife, who (I think) is supposed to have been made by her husband to deny the reality of their lives together and to think death preferable, Cotillard is certainly more successful than Ellen Page, who, as Ariadne, looks miserable and incredulous, as well she might. To say her heart isn’t in the lines she’s required to speak is to put it mildly; without the possibility of characterisation, Page seems zombified and, although she’s been given the majority of gags, that is doing her no favours – except for the fact that the gags are so few.
Christopher Nolan’s approach in The Dark Knight was also short on laughs but the vibrancy of some of the performers – Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal and, especially, Heath Ledger – eluded his grim control: that doesn’t happen in the monumentally humourless Inception. People (or, in the case of Wall-E, animated objects) hearing fragments of familiar refrains when they’re feeling a long way from home seems de rigueur in pretentious science fiction and Nolan’s idea of a joke seems to be to choose ‘Je ne regrette rien’ for this slot because he has Edith Piaf in the cast. Most of the music is provided by Hans Zimmer: it arrives on cue every time something especially major is about to happen so I suppose its pounding self-importance is appropriate. Just as The Lovely Bones was a surprise in Peter Jackson’s not giving special effects priority to heaven, so Christopher Nolan is evidently uninterested in making dreams dreamlike. Dreams may seem essential to this movie but in the end they are functional – the requirements of a structurally ingenious plot. Nolan was probably shrewd not to try and create oneiric textures and thus fail to emulate the artistry of Wild Strawberries or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or Twin Peaks. In Inception, the widely-held view that dreams are fascinating to the dreamer but dead boring to those on the receiving end of an account of them takes on a whole new meaning.
3 August 2010
