Cinefile

In a summer full of droll remakes, sequels, spin-offs and pasty teen vampires, Christopher Nolan’s Inception bursts onto the scene with an urgent and slick force. Here is a gapingly imperfect film that still manages to dazzle us with its visuals and remind us that the Hollywood summer movie machine may still have a few tricks up its sleeve. With that said, in order to understand the palpable mixed bag of goods that is Inception, it’s crucial to look closely at what flies and what doesn’t. First, what works; as the film’s protagonist Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio revisits the tortured soul of his role in the far superior Shutter Island (released earlier this year) to channel a corporate “idea” thief who leads a pack of Ocean's Eleven-esque mind thieves across the various dreamscapes of the unsuspecting mark (Cillian Murphy) they’re shaking down. The good news is that DiCaprio delivers; it’s a performance that can be underappreciated since he is in almost every scene of the film. Working from an over imagined screenplay by Nolan, DiCaprio keeps Cobb rooted in believable conviction. And even though Inception has Cobb and company passing through several dream settings and levels of consciousness, DiCaprio is able to persuade the audience to keep watching—or more importantly, to actually think that they’re being intellectually and emotionally engaged.

But that’s where some of the problems with Inception begin. For a film that spends almost its entire first hour explaining its ideas, theories and so-called “rules,” it doesn’t deliver the emotional goods when it comes down the final stretch. Nevertheless, the film works on so many sheer technical levels, it’s worth seeing just for that (especially in a special effects summer that has countless CGI films and zero ideas). Two set pieces in particular stand out and should be studied by aspiring sound designers, editors and cinematographers everywhere. The first is a spectacular car/train wreck in the middle of a rainy Los Angeles intersection. Nolan wisely uses the obfuscation from the falling rain on the windshields, the sound effects of cars screeching and crashing and an expert edit which reveals an unexpected force that should make the audience jump back in unison. The next sequence involves Cobb’s associate Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) fighting some bad guys in suits (the film calls these dream antagonists “projections” of one’s subconscious) up, across and down a hotel corridor. To say that defies the laws of physics is an understatement. And Nolan shot this sequence on an actual rig that rotated with the actors hanging by wires. The physicality of this section alone results in an exhilarating sense of awe (on a side note, it’s further proof that Sam Raimi dropped the ball by rendering a CGI Tobey Maguire in tights with his Spider-Man trilogy). In Inception, you can almost feel the weight of these men as they either hover or whiz by the camera. To quote my fellow moviegoers: “Some cool shit.”

But at the end of the day Nolan is an apt filmmaker who shouldn’t rest on just “cool shit.” This is the director who made watching a superhero movie exciting and emotionally engaging (Batman Begins) and also took a foreign thriller and added his own take on moral danger (Insomnia, his best film to date) to make it rise above its source. With Inception, Nolan obviously wants to blow our minds but his problem is with his over-blown budget: after so many exhaustive set pieces and jumping back and forth between alternate realities and a van falling off a bridge, the audience begins to ask, “Why is any of this important?” But then again, for a Hollywood summer blockbuster to prod at some big ideas that it obviously can’t digest is a notable enough gesture for me to recommend it.

Note: I realize that my 4 out of 5 star review of Inception puts me in a small group of critics who don’t think it’s a “masterpiece”—but that’s doesn’t worry me. You see, movie fans have decided that Inception was a masterpiece way before it was even released. Already on IMDb.com, users polled it #83 on the Top 250 Films of All Time, putting it ahead of such influential films like Blade Runner (#111) and Metropolis (#92). It’s funny: most cinemaniacs haven’t even seen the film yet. It’s as if an inception was performed in their minds…