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Ideas are insidious, ferocious little things. Dreams are where ideas go to let their hair down, to stretch to their fullest potential, to find the point at which their internal logic crumbles. We summon entire universes in our dreams, dangerous, deeply personal universes, fueled only by ideas and the unseen, unfathomable underside of whatever iceberg it is that makes us tick.
All things considered then, if you're a protagonist in a Christopher Nolan film, playing with ideas is (for want of a better phrase) a bad idea. From Leonard Shelby to Bruce Wayne, Nolan's leads have always been men with grave personal demons and dangerous obsessions, and Inception's Don Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is no different. Cobb is a thief who peddles in ideas, a mercenary of the mind who goes deep into people's heads to retrieve secrets and ideas. Think bastard child of Sigmund Freud and 160-million-dollar-Chinese-man.
Cobb and his team have an intriguing modus operandi; they generate a shared dream with the target, "extract" ideas, and get out. The target wakes, blinks away the dream, and goes his merry way. For reasons that become clear as the film progresses, Cobb agrees to "one last job". Naturally it's more complex and devious than anything he's tried before, so he puts together the psychological equivalent of the A-Team, and gets to work. To reveal any more would be to spoil the fun.
And what fun it is. Nolan uses the idea of the subconscious to mount a plot that would put a Rube Goldberg machine to shame, a scheme so devious and intricate that it puts the Joker's machinations to shame. But because Nolan is Nolan, and because, I suspect, he has obsessions as dangerous as his leads', the heist is just his launch-pad. While most directors would be content to use an idea as a MacGuffin, Inception is more concerned with grander themes. It picks at the world-altering power of ideas, it peers at the machinations of the mind, it reels at the arrogance of creation, and it ponders at the seductive lure of choosing a reality most convenient to you.
The genius of Nolan's writing is his ability to humanize and personify every aspect of the dream-world without dumbing it down, or talking down at you. For example, a "totem" is a deeply personal object of unique significance to you, that act as your anchor in a dream. "The kick" is the sense of freefall that often wakes you from a dream. And while much of cinema often turns dreamscapes into wild flights of fancy, bouncing from surreal image to image, Nolan shrewdly goes the other way. He stages his action in smaller, more specific dreamscapes, each with their loose (but consistent) internal logic, and then turns the entropy in each dreamscape all the way up to eleven. The result is dizzying, exhilarating, and flat-out mind-blowing.
Nolan is aided at every turn by his top-drawer cast, easily the best ensemble in a film this year. Leonardo DiCaprio does a lot of heavy lifting as Don Cobb, but lucky for him he's got a stellar bunch to help him along. Ellen Page is just the right mix of cocky and naive as Ariadne (wiki that name for a clue to her part in things), and Ken Watanabe is suitably portentous, but nobody looks like they're having more fun than Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt. They're the Malloy brothers of the piece, the perfect heist combo of mutual antagonism and pro-skills. Hans Zimmer's brass-band-fueled score, with its ominous blasts of the tuba, is a character in its own right, heralding the awesomeness of each new dreamscape.
Inception is a rare film. It's a furiously-paced thriller that is somehow also cinema for the senses. And science-fiction. And a crushingly emotional tale. It's the sort of film that's going to fuel a billion stoned discussions, that's going to galvanize forums and Nolan fanboys. It also takes care of the entire "How is he ever going to top The Dark Knight?" question. "An idea," says Cobb, explaining the stakes, "can transform the world and rewrite all the rules." Well thank god someone in Hollywood still has a few then. And thank god that someone is Christopher Nolan.
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| | Posted 7/14/2010 4:24 AM - 1684 Views - 18 eProps - 22 comments
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