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| Thursday, July 15, 2010 07:43 AM |
| On the Viewer - Inception |
 by Fëanor |
See. This. Movie.
I'll talk more about it, because I can't help myself, but that's really all you have to know.
I'm not even sure how to describe Inception. It doesn't fit comfortably into any one genre. It's perhaps closest to being a heist film, as it follows the general structure of that type of movie, and includes various tropes from that genre: the extremely talented thief with a heart of gold who only has to pull this One Last Job to get out of the game forever (our main character, Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio); the Setup, where we learn the details of the incredibly difficult Last Job; the sequence where the master thief assembles his Team - a team which includes the dependable buddy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur), the slick, sarcastic grifter (Tom Hardy as Eames), the outsider he has to take along against his will (Ken Watanabe as Saito), a specialist with the drugs and the knowhow to get them through (Dileep Rao as Yusuf), and a team member who's secretly unstable and almost sure to ruin everything (who, in an interesting twist, is in this case our main character himself, Cobb); the sequence where they develop the Plan, which is complex and brilliant, but still almost certainly doomed to failure; the Job itself, during which unforeseen complications arise that seem to present our heroes with insurmountable obstacles.
The problem with labeling the film a heist movie, however, is that it's not about stealing anything. In fact, the thief and his crew are breaking into the deepest recesses of someone's mind, not to take something away, but to leave something behind that wasn't there before: the seed of an idea. They're attempting a feat so rare it's considered a myth by some. They're trying to change someone's mind without him knowing they're doing it. It's called inception.
And here's where the movie starts to seem less like a heist flick and more like a fantasy or sci-fi film, as the entire plot revolves around a technology that allows people to share a dream, and manipulate the world within that dream. An astonishing opening sequence acquaints us with some of the rules that govern this technology. Then our main character has to recruit a newbie into the group - a dream architect with the almost too appropriate name of Ariadne, played by Ellen Page - to help with the final job, and as Cobb teaches her, we learn along with her. The dream world is surreal and breathtaking, with stairways that lead in infinite loops, cities folded in on themselves, hotels without gravity, giant mirror doors that shatter and reveal new landscapes, huge decaying cities built over years of dream-time, secret totems to keep our heroes grounded and remind them whether the world they're in is real or an illusion. But throughout these opening sequences, writer/director Christopher Nolan is only laying down the ground rules. During the Job itself, he switches into high gear and cranks everything up to another level, dropping us down into dreams within dreams within dreams, where seconds can last hours or even decades; layering mazes one within another; carefully orchestrating and interweaving multiple action sequences across many different realities.
Because you see, on another level, the film is also an effective action movie, fast-paced and violent. But the violence doesn't always have the consequences we're used to - it can be the gateway back to reality, or to a hellish limbo from which few have escaped.
But at its center, the film is perhaps most of all a character drama. It's the story of the flawed, shattered Cobb, trying to escape the ghost of his wife (Mal, played by Marion Cotillard) and the terrible secrets that surround his past so he can get back home to his children. It's about Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), a man haunted by his own ghost - that of his powerful and distant father. Like all great films, Inception is about people and their relationships with each other - although thankfully the movie refrains from trying to build the usual, tired romance between the leading man and lady; Ariadne is clearly interested in Cobb, but the film is content to leave their relationship at that level, and so was I. Inception is about creation and destruction; it's about getting lost and finding oneself again. It's about the strange and difficult task of living in the world - a world where nothing is certain.
Watching Inception is an experience of true joy - the joy of observing a wondrously complex, carefully constructed mechanism spin through its paces. It's a film of such bravado and such wild invention, displaying such a mastery of the art of cinema, that it's hard to keep your jaw from dropping and your breath from being sucked away in gasps as you watch it. It's visually stunning, the writing is excellent, and the performances are complex and effective across the board; even secondary characters are played by great actors, with Tom Berenger, Pete Postlethwaite, and Michael Caine turning in satisfying cameos.
Certain truly great films have endings that, when they come, seem inevitable - perfect. The only possible ending. You see them coming, but only from a short way away. It's as if you're returning to the conclusion of a half-remembered dream you had once. Inception has an ending like that. |
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