If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we’ve entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be awesome, which isn’t nearly the same thing.
In Inception, Nolan does the impossible, the unthinkable, the stupendous: He folds a mirror version of Paris back upon itself; he stages a fight sequence in a gravity-free hotel room; he sends a train plowing through a busy city street. Whatever you can dream, Nolan does it in Inception. Then he nestles those little dreams into even bigger dreams, and those bigger dreams into gargantuan dreams, going on into infinity, cubed. He stretches the boundaries of filmmaking so that it’s, like, not even filmmaking anymore, it’s just pure “OMG I gotta text my BFF right now” sensation.
Wouldn’t it have been easier just to make a movie?
But that urgent simplicity, that directness of focus, is beyond Nolan: Everything he does is forced and overthought, and Inception, far from being his ticket into hall-of-fame greatness, is a very expensive-looking, elephantine film whose myriad so-called complexities — of both the emotional and intellectual sort — add up to a kind of ADD tedium. This may be a movie about dreams, but there’s nothing dreamlike or evocative about it: Nolan doesn’t build or sustain a mood; all he does is twist the plot, under, over, and back upon itself, relying on Hans Zimmer’s sonic boom of a score to remind us when we should be excited or anxious or moved. It’s less directing than directing traffic.
Nolan’s aim, perhaps, is to keep us so confused we won’t dare question his genius. The movie opens with Leonardo DiCaprio being washed up on a beach somewhere — mysteriously, there are two little blond children cavorting around, though we can’t see their faces. Then some Japanese soldiers drag him into a menacing-looking seaside castle nearby. Then he sits down at a table, opposite some mysterious old guy, and proceeds to eat some gruel. What, you might ask, is going on here, as bits of runny porridge drip from the haggard-looking DiCaprio’s lips? You’re supposed to be perplexed — it’s all part of the movie’s puzzly-wuzzly structure.
Before long we learn that DiCaprio’s character is an “extractor,” meaning he’s a skilled craftsman who can enter others’ dreams to draw out valuable information, useful, particularly, in corporate espionage. His name is Dom Cobb — which is, I guess, better than being called Com Dobb — and not only does he have the ability to enter others’ dreams; he actually builds those dreams, with the help of his number-two man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), plus an architect, who had better know what he or she is doing. The architect working for Cobb at the beginning of the movie (he’s played, all too briefly, by Lukas Haas) meets a bad end after installing the wrong kind of shag carpeting in an important dream. Perhaps these dreams need interior decorators, too, to prevent future faux pas, but let’s not get off-track.
Luckily, Cobb’s replacement architect, an earnest young student named Ariadne (Ellen Page), is more on the ball, and she senses that Cobb has some dark, painful secret buried deep in the basement of his subconscious. (Later, Nolan will show us an actual elevator going down into that basement, to reinforce the metaphor.) Cobb’s secret has something to do with those two little blond kids we keep seeing in his subconscious and his extremely pissed-off wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who haunts his dreams dressed mostly in an assortment of evening gowns. Cobb’s personal trauma has become intertwined with his latest assignment: A onetime mark who has become an associate (or something — the relationship is never made clear), Saito (Ken Watanabe), has suggested that Cobb may find a way back to his wife and family, if only he can penetrate the dreams of a young man, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who’s just inherited his father’s business empire.
That “way back” can be summed up in one word — Inception! — which is incanted again and again, like the name of a Calvin Klein perfume. (Every time Cobb hears it, his ears perk up like a Doberman’s.) Inception is even more pretentious and overstuffed than Nolan’s last picture, The Dark Knight, a feat I’d not have thought possible. It also shows the same lack of regard for visual logic. (I’m still waiting for someone to tell me how Heath Ledger’s Joker got off that building ledge, which is where we last saw him.)
But Nolan serves up great visuals, you say. Just look at that folded-up, upside-down Paris, all those fantastic slow-motion explosions, the way that van takes 1,762 seconds to veer off a bridge and into the water. It’s all so cool, right? But that’s not the same as arranging those images coherently so that the viewer always knows who’s coming from where, and why. In the movie’s climactic scene — or, rather, one of its numerous climactic dream-within-a-dream scenes — a character gets chased around a snowy mountain by guys with automatic weapons. Who are they, and where did they come from? There are other characters on that mountain, too, but we have no idea where they are, or what they’re doing in relation to one another.
Because Nolan can’t connect his visuals, he has to use words, and lots of them, to let us know what characters are doing and why we should care. Every scene is packed with helpful explanatory dialogue like “Killing him would just wake him up” and “Pain is in the mind.” “A closed loop will help you control the levels of the dream you create,” one character explains matter-of-factly to another, and she responds as if she’s just heard the music of the spheres. There’s more: “As we go deeper into Fischer, we’re also going deeper into you. And I’m not sure we’re going to like what we find.” (Don’t go in the basement.) You’ll find one instance of the ever-popular “Trust me — he’s hiding something, and we need to find out what it is.” I hope you’re not too shocked to learn that “She had herself declared sane by three different psychologists.” And last but not least, pay close attention to this pithy solution to a grave problem: “As soon as Arthur’s music kicks in, just revive him with the defibrillator.” Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?
When Nolan fears things might be getting a little slow, he pumps up the Zimmermusik, much of which sounds derivative of old James Bond scores, only bigger, louder and less melodic. This isn’t an actors’ movie: None of Nolan’s movies are — the most they demand are stunts and gimmicks, or at best a constipated expression that suggests a character is suffering deeply repressed pain. DiCaprio is pretty good at wearing that expression here, but he’s not called upon to do much else. And Levitt, a versatile performer who’s always interesting to watch, is completely wasted in a colorless role. Similarly, Page is required to do little more than blink her enormous eyes, like a carnival Kewpie. And Michael Caine’s appearance is so brief, he may as well be a mirage in this vast desert.
Inception is nice enough to look at; the DP is Wally Pfister, who frequently collaborates with Nolan, and he makes those Parisian streets, in particular, look very pretty and bright. But the deeper you get into the movie, the more its polished visual surface feels like a deception. Nearly every moment in Inception is so big, so fattened-up, that nothing has any weight; because every little thing is of the gravest importance, there’s nothing at stake. Nolan keeps the story whirring, all right — he’s the man behind the curtain, feverishly pushing levers and operating dials. He uses his figurative bullhorn to ask allegedly deep questions, like “What’s real, and what’s illusion?” (He’s the Doug Henning of filmmakers.) But although Inception gives the appearance of being a work of intelligence and complexity, it’s really just an ungodly tangle. There’s no elegance in Nolan’s vision, only sweat. He’s the dream architect who thinks he’s doing us a favor by giving us a shag rug.
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