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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment