Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 23, 2010
The Critic's Corner
David Laprad
Something happened at the midnight screening of “Inception” I attended that I will never forget: as the film cut abruptly from its provocative last shot to black, several hundred hardcore movie geeks erupted in thunderous applause.
Not everyone who sees “Inception” will have the same reaction. Like those with whom I saw the movie, some will claim it’s a stunning achievement, a brilliant fusion of popcorn entertainment and art house bravado, and a hard slap in the face of an industry that has slipped into a stupor. But others will walk away either hating it or wondering what the big deal was.
I fall in with the first group.
In “Inception,” writer and director Chris Nolan (“The Dark Knight”) uses the elements of a heist movie to lure viewers into a labyrinth of ideas about the nature of reality. As a thriller, it’s watertight, exciting and packed with mind-blowing special effects; as a meditation on the nature of the world around us, it works a rare kind of magic. I can’t remember the last time a film entertained me as much as “Inception” did while also making me use brain cells that have, more or less, been on vacation since college.
Our guide through “Incep-tion” is Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man who’s mastered technology that allows him to slip unnoticed into the dreams of other people and steal their knowledge. Cobb is also a fugitive who can’t return to the U.S. If he were to try, he’d be arrested for allegedly committing a crime unrelated to his unique profession. This poses a problem, as Cobb’s two children live in America with his dad, and he longs to see them.
As “Inception” opens, Cobb is doing a trial run for a powerful man who wants him to plant an idea in a target’s head rather than steal one. Although Cobb isn’t sure he can pull off the job, the client claims he can make all of Cobb’s problems go away with one phone call, so he takes the job.
There’s just one catch: A woman named Mal keeps showing up in the dreams Cobb invades. Her presence disturbs Cobb, jeopardizing the mission.
Nolan uses this simple foundation to support a story of substantial complexity. I can only imagine the painstaking hours he spent snapping together the plot, making sure the individual pieces formed a complete picture. Minor alterations must have given way to weeks of rewrites as he tried to contain the ripples.
The story also had to serve the themes Nolan wanted to explore. Like an Escher-style maze, his concepts form stairways that ascend and descend in an infinite loop, walls that create impossible angles and sidewalks that continue up the sides of buildings. You could stare at the architecture for hours, and still be unable to pinpoint the logic that keeps it all from falling apart.
Nolan wraps these highly structured components in a visual tour de force. From a marketplace that explodes in bits and pieces as a dream dissolves, to a city that folds in on itself, to a fistfight in a hallway in which the center of gravity continually shifts between the floor, the ceiling and the walls, the effects in “Inception” will loosen the muscles that hold your jaw in place.
Is “Inception” a perfect movie? Subsequent viewings might bring minor defects to light, but for now, it seems one can explain away the ostensible cracks in the veneer of the film. For example, the only character Nolan fleshes out with a history and an emotional crisis is Cobb. Everyone else, including the members of his team, are nothing more than plot mechanisms. We don’t know who they are, where they came from, or why they work with DiCaprio’s character. This keeps the viewer focused on Cobb and avoids pointless distractions. Also, Nolan doesn’t explain the technology that allows Cobb and his group to jack into other people’s dreams. The film is dense enough.
As I walked out of the theater after seeing “Inception,” I had one thought in my head: “I have GOT to see that again!” I want to filter the entire movie through the knowledge of what Nolan shows in the final shot, which made me question everything I’d seen. I hope to do a better job of keeping up during the nail-biting finale, when Cobb and his team fall asleep in a dream and enter a deeper dream level twice, with each level representing a different amount of time in the real world. And I want to look at the edges of the screen and see the special effects I missed the first time.
Above all, I want to re-experience every moment, and every nuance, of this extraordinary movie.
Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.
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