Inception

Inception is a terrific idea for a movie. Actually, it's a terrific idea because it is a movie. It's a film whose story could exist only because cinema exists. If cinema hadn't been invented yet, it's doubtful that a novelist could have come up with the storyline or themes that writer-director Christopher Nolan explores in his latest work. Unfortunately, the idea alone doesn't guarantee a successful outcome. The film falls far short of its goal, which I interpret as the ambitious one of combining the logic of dreams and the logic of cinematic storytelling into a whole--or at least, into an experience in which the two wholly complement one another.

The premise is undeniably intriguing. Dom Cobb (Leonardo di Caprio) is the leader of a team of dream extractors, practitioners of one of those vaguely plausible fringe sciences invented to propel the plots of science fiction/fantasy tales. Extractors invade a person's dreams in order to remove information buried within the dreamer's unconscious mind. They do this for profit, working at the highest level of corporate espionage: one business rival wants to steal another's secrets, so he hires Cobb to hijack the rival and burglarize his/her brain. It's as illegal as actual stealing, which means extractors are essentially just sophisticated crooks. Cobb himself has legal problems apart from his nefarious work; he's an expatriate floating around Europe, unable to return to the U.S., for reasons which are only gradually revealed.

The beginning is ingenious, crafted around an audacious use of in medias res--the film actually opens inside one of the dreams Cobb and his crew have broken into. This opening gambit is quickly exposed as a deception, however. They have been hired by a Japanese magnate, Saito (Ken Watanabe), to ferret out a secret he has taken great pains to secure from discovery (in the world the film imagines, dream theft is a constant threat among the high and mighty). It's a test of his own internal security measures but also an elaborate audition, for the businessman wants to gauge the crew's skill before hiring them for the real job he has in mind--to enter a competitor's unconscious, not to steal an idea but to plant a new one, one which will benefit his own company's interests.

Around this slight premise, Nolan conjures a dark fantasy of revenge, guilt, and an uneasy sort of redemption. At its core, though, the film is a fanciful variation on an old genre--the heist/crime caper film. Cobb and his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are master thieves with the latest technology in their tool kits: they plan virtual robberies and steal imaginary loot. But their break-ins also involve elaborate deceptions and role-playing, so they're master con artists as well. The Sting meets Ocean's Eleven, in the realm of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In accordance with genre rules, a fair amount of time is spent recruiting new members to the team, experts in different fields who possess special talents needed for the job at hand. Those scenes are often among the most enjoyable in heist films, and Inception proves no exception. Tom Hardy, in particular, is amusing as a wisecracking grifter with the ability to shapeshift into different identities to fit the changing scenarios of his victim's dreams. But most screen time is devoted to Cobb's wooing of the suggestively named Ariadne, a bright young architectural student played winningly, as always, by the wonderful Ellen Page. Page brings her trademark blend of sweetness and sass to what's basically a stock role--she's the neophyte in the group, the one who needs schooling in the ways of dream intervention. Her scenes are therefore padded with exposition as Cobb and others explain to her exactly what dream extractors do and what it all means. This makes her the audience's surrogate, its symbolized presence in the world of the film. As she struggles to make sense of the confusing images and events around her, and later begins to find answers on her own, so do we--though undoubtedly with less authority than Page musters.

Ariadne is not merely a sounding board for plot points, however. She brings a much needed talent to the team--the ability to design a world that, despite being imaginary, is credible enough to fool their mark into believing his dreams are reality. Extraction/inception works only during dreams vivid enough for the dreamers to experience them with the intensity of real life--so-called lucid dreaming. During their incursion into his sleep state, the extraction team brings a carefully scripted and illustrated series of dreams that they share with the victim, and each other, so that they all can interact in the same storyline (the extractors must be asleep as well). Since the setting in which they act out these fantasies needs to look believable for the process to work, the team requires an architect to first build it image by image, then sustain the illusion or change it as needed, while the plot unfolds. Performing this complex creative task makes Ariadne a surrogate for the filmmaker; since she's also the surrogate viewer, Nolan has created in her a character which functions in a complex relationship to the film, both embodying the connection between the artist and his work and providing the thread which binds it to its audience.

The set-up is fascinating, but once the caper finally begins, the film quickly, and quite surprisingly, becomes less so. Getting all the pieces in place for the robbery was good fun, but the robbery itself is a confusing, overlong, turgid affair. Cobb and his cohorts, accompanied by Saito, trap their victim, Fischer (Cillian Murphy), on an overseas flight; once all are asleep, they break into his dreams and go to work. This work occupies the whole second half of the movie, and it takes the picture down the wrong rabbit hole.

The main problem is that Nolan seems to lose interest in the underlying notion of his film: projecting oneself into another's dream suddenly is no longer cool enough for him, so he complicates matters by multiplying the number of dreams his protagonists have to infiltrate. Once inside Fischer's sleeping mind, Nolan's dream team must move to a second level--a dream within a dream--and then to a third dream inside that. And, unfortunately, it doesn't end there... With several different scenarios unfolding at once, the film furiously tracks Cobb and his partners fighting their way through elaborate defense mechanisms consisting of security guards and fortresses in simultaneous but separate dream systems, all to get to the place where they can successfully plant the notion that Saito believes will eliminate Fischer's company as his rival. It's a fairly simple goal--why does it seem like it takes forever to reach? And why couldn't this idea have been dropped somewhere in Fischer's first, or even second, level of dreaming? That's never adequately explained. Or maybe I fell asleep and missed that part.

Nolan likes writing stories that play with structure, and he's usually good at it. Memento (2000) memorably runs backwards, as the hero searches for the origin to his mysterious form of amnesia. The Prestige (2006) takes duality between characters to such an extreme that it passes beyond logic into a kind of dream state of its own. Even the more conventional Batman films (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) fracture story time and space so thoroughly that they exist in a kind of hyper-real universe--not the safely iconic comic book world of other superhero movies, but a broken, more dangerous version of our own.

Now comes Inception, in which Nolan is once again looking for the edge rather than undermining the middle. He's clearly out to create something unique to movie screens, a film story that composes itself in part from the complex layering logic of dreams: a cine-dream, perhaps. To this end, he discards the usual duality of dream vs. reality for that of dream vs. dream, which in theory is interesting. Unfortunately, execution is another matter. The film expends far too much energy constructing its maze of interlocking story parts--there's little left over to make it meaningful for the viewer. In this case, more is definitely less. With each successive layer of dreamwork it penetrates, the film becomes less interesting, since its tension is diffused over a greater area. The basic lesson of cutting between two different courses of action to create suspense is as old as D.W. Griffith, but jumping back and forth between four dream stories--especially when the connections between them are as tenuous as they are in this film--drastically reduces the dramatic impact of each. Inception suffers from narrational hyperventilation--it aims for a powerful emotional experience but produces mostly dizziness.

Nolan does try to add some gravitas to the proceedings by giving Cobb a back story laced with tragedy. The dreams the conspirators use for their undercover work are shared, and despite their attempts to plan them out beforehand, each individual's thoughts and fears can send them on unexpected detours at any moment during the operation. The one who poses the most danger to the enterprise is its leader, Cobb. His psyche is a mess, haunted by images of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), easily the film's most arresting figure. Wildly beautiful and completely mad, the appropriately named Mal lives vengefully within Cobb's guilt-burdened mind, popping up at the worst possible times to expose Cobb as an intruder to the dreamer-victim and force him and his team to abort their mission. Sometimes she even tries to kill him. Why Cobb should be harboring murderous visions of Mal in his unconscious is the film's central mystery; its solution gives Inception its provocative, bittersweet climax.

The role of Cobb is perfectly tailored to di Caprio, an actor of such effortless intensity he could probably make ordering from a menu seem like a cathartic experience. But the script actually gives him little to work with, and the character is tame compared to earlier Nolan protagonists--the tormented, tragic Bruce Wayne/Batman and the Apocalyptic visitation of Heath Ledger's Joker. The narrative tries to make up for Cobb's lack of depth by the way it's organized: by inserting one dream inside another, the film mimics a literal descent into Cobb's internal hell, one circle at a time. But it never feels right because Cobb's demons aren't really depth dwellers; they live close to the surface, where--had they been released earlier--they might have generated more heat.

Inception's ultimate undoing, however, is its lack of originality, which is ironic given its aspirations. Behind the cine-dream experimentation and the Matrix-like visuals--the slow motion, suspended-in-air combat ballets, the vaguely futuristic dream settings and cityscapes--is fairly standard action fare (car chases, gun battles), disappointing by Nolan's standards, who raised the bar for summer actioners with his dark, poetic, psychologically dense renderings of violence in the aforementioned Batman Begins and the extraordinary The Dark Knight. There's little here that feels as fresh and inventive as the set pieces in those films. And apart from one sequence in which Ariadne performs the mind-blowing feat of bending an entire city block over on itself--buildings, cars, people, everything--the pictorial style of Inception is not very exceptional.

Nolan's film may also be the victim of bad timing, coming in the wake of last year's blockbuster Avatar, which fashioned its now famous story around a different type of psychic projection. Inception's vision is muddled compared to that film, which worked hard to make the notion of dreaming one's way into an alternate state of being accessible to audiences. The difference between the two pictures runs much deeper, however. Avatar made its imagined technology into a metaphor for cinema itself. In the story, the "dreamer" projects his/her consciousness into the body of another being and lives inside it. In an analogous manner, the movie spectator projects his/her consciousness into the world of the film story, passing through the screen to "live inside" that world for as long as the film runs. One of the things Avatar is about, then, is what it's like to watch a movie, how it feels to experience it fully. In other words, it's about itself.

Inception, on the other hand, is about what it isn't--but could become. The film attempts to turn our experience of watching a movie--watching this particular movie, that is--into something like what our mind experiences while dreaming. By adapting dream logic to film narration, Inception tries to replicate the way the unconscious mind creates the "stories" that live inside us all. It's using cinema to go beyond cinema, into the realm of the greater human mystery.

Avatar is much more successful at what it does, but of course it has the easier task. It's much simpler to make a movie about being a movie than to make one that imitates the unconscious mind. I applaud Nolan for the attempt. What would the cinema be without dreamers like him?