Inception

You know a director that I haven’t talked about for over a year? Christopher Nolan. I haven’t mentioned him since I did his Batman trilogy last January. Actually, there is a movie he directed that I can review for this month: “Inception,” released in 2010. I saw this movie at a cousin's house a while back.

Rumor has it that Christopher Nolan spent 10 years writing the screenplay to this movie. Roger Ebert guessed, “That must have involved prodigious concentration, like playing blindfold chess while walking a tight-wire.” The film’s protagonist tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan messes us with her heads with his own dizzying maze. We have to trust him that he can get us out of this maze, because mostly we’re lost and confused. Nolan must have rewritten this story a lot, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the very core.

The story can be told in a few sentences or not at all. Here is a movie resistant to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that wouldn’t tell you anything unless you knew how it got there.  By telling you how it got there would give confusion. The movie is all about the process, about fighting our way through the realms of reality and dreams, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It’s a tiring juggling act, and Nolan may have considered “Momento” a starter. He apparently started this screenplay with filming “Momento.” The story was about a man who had short-term memory loss, and the story was told backwards.

Like the hero of that film, whoever is watching “Inception” is lost in time and experience. We can never be sure about the relationship between real time and dream time. The protagonist explains that you can never remember the beginning of the dream, and dreams apparently that last for hours are only for a short time. Yes, but you don’t know that you’re dreaming. What if you’re inside another person’s dream? How does your dream synch with his? What do you really know?

Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a corporate thief of the highest position. He breaks in the minds of other men and steals their ideas. Now he is offered a position by a billionaire to do the antithesis: To introduce an idea into an enemy’s mind, and do it so well that he believes that it’s his own idea. This is something that has never been done before. Ebert says that, “our minds are as alert to foreign ideas as our immune system is to pathogens.” The rich man is named Saito, played by Ken Watanabe, who makes him an offer he can’t refuse, an offer that would end Cobb’s forced banishment from home and family.

Cobb brings together a team, and here the movie depends on the well-established processes of every theft movie. We meet the members that he will be working with: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his longtime friend; James (Tom Hardy), a master at trickery; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a master chemist, and a new recruit, Ariadne (Lesbian actress, but respectable, Ellen Page), a brilliant architect who is a genius at creating spaces. Cobb also gets in contact with his father-in-law Miles, played by Michael Caine, who knows what he does and how he does it. Ebert says, “These days Michael Caine need only appear on a screen and we assume he's wiser than any of the other characters. It's a gift.”

Hold on, how come Cobb needs an architect to create spaces in dreams? He explains to Ariadne that dreams have a shifting architecture, as we all know. Where we appear to be has a way to shift. Cobb’s mission is the “inception” (or birth, or wellspring) of a new idea in the mind of another young billionaire, Robert Fischer Jr., played by Cillian Murphy, successor to his father’s empire. Saito wants him to start ideas that will lead to the surrender of his enemy’s company. Cobb needs Ariadne to create a misleading maze-space in Fischer’s dreams so that (Ebert guesses) new thoughts can come into his head anonymously. Do you think Nolan likes Greek Mythology? Don’t get me wrong, I minored in Classical Mythology in college, so I like it as well. If you have read the myth of Theseus, which I have, the girl who helped Theseus out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth was also named Ariadne.

Cobb teaches Ariadne on the realm of dream penetration, the talent of controlling dreams and navigating them. Nolan uses that trait for teaching us as well. Also as the occasion for some of the movie’s amazing special effects, which appears pointless in the trailer but fit right in now. Ebert admits, “The most impressive to me takes place (or seems to) in Paris, where the city literally rolls back on itself like a roll of linoleum tile.”

Protecting Fischer is a handful of gun-holding bodyguards, who may be working like the mental equal of antibodies. They seem otherwise real and symbolic, but whatever they might be, they start a whole lot of gunfights, chase scenes and explosions, which movies show us the conflict we see a lot of today. Even Ebert says, “So skilled is Nolan that he actually got me involved in one of his chases, when I thought I was relatively immune to scenes that have become so standard. That was because I cared about who was chasing and being chased.”

If you saw any of the advertising for this film, you know that its architecture has a way to surpass the laws of gravity. Buildings tilt, streets coil, characters float, all of this is explained in the narrative. The movie is a confusing labyrinth without a simple through-line, and is sure to inspire an endless psychiatry on the web.

Nolan helps us with the emotional strand. The reason why Cobb is motivated to risk the dangers of this inception is because of grief and guilt which involves his wife Mal, played by Marion Cotillard, and their two children. Ebert says, “More I will not (in a way, cannot) say.” Cotillard amazingly symbolizes the wife in a romanticized way. Whether we are seeing Cobb’s memories or his dreams are difficult to figure out, even in the last shot. Ebert does say that, “she makes Mal function as an emotional magnet, and the love between the two provides an emotional constant in Cobb's world, which is otherwise ceaselessly shifting.”

“Inception” works for the viewer, in a way, like the world itself worked for the main character in “Momento.” We are always in the Now. We did take notes while we made it to the Here, but we are not quite sure where the Here is. Yet matters of life, death and the heart are involved – and the multi-national corporations, of course. Nolan doesn’t take a break without using well-designed scenes from spycraft to espionage, including a clever plot on board a 747 (even explaining why it has to be a 747).

The movies often look like they came from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. “Inception” does a difficult task. It is completely original, taken from a new area, and yet made with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. Ebert said in his review, “I thought there was a hole in "Memento:" How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there's a hole in "Inception" too, but I can't find it.” Christopher Nolan remade Batman. This time he isn’t remaking anything. Yet few directors will attempt to recycle “Inception.” Ebert admits that, “I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.”

This movie will mess with your head, because of how deep they go into the dream world. It’s very much like Dante’s Inferno, where the deeper they go; it’s like a new cycle of Satan’s home. I actually read Dante’s Inferno once for a college class one semester. Definitely check this one out if you haven’t, you will love it.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the next entry in “Halloween Month.”