INCEPTION review
INCEPTION review
Jul 22
You’ve got to love a good old-fashioned rug. Perhaps a woollen one, faded with age, covering the long cold hall and preventing you from freezing your toes off on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It’s not hard to become attached to rugs, especially such ancient, familiar ones; a good rug can be as comforting in the long dark tea-time of the soul as a good towel.
Christopher Nolan is not a man who shares my enthusiasm for rugs. He experiences some kind of perverse glee in yanking the poor things right out from under me, in fact. The first few times he does it, it’s like “Ha ha, good one, Chris, you sure got me.” Then, not merely content with watching me tumble head-over-heels half a dozen times, Nolan gets clever. He takes the woollen threads of the rug, when I’m not looking, and uses them to tie my feet to the rug. So the next time he yanks it out from under me, I find myself unable to disengage myself from the violently bucking antique carpeting device; I find myself entirely at the prankster’s mercy. Unfortunately for me, Christopher Nolan is one hell of a prankster.
Inception relies on your willingness to run headfirst into the practical joke over and over again. It’s not like Memento where you always knew your rug was in danger, but didn’t know quite how, like it was floating on top of a very unstable body of water; this time, Nolan knows his audience is wary (as a very important idiot once said, “Fool me twice … shame on you”). So with Inception, he comes up with new and exciting ways to disorient and confuse the viewer.
There’s no point discussing the plot of Inception; even explaining the title would spoil the first half or so of the film. Suffice it to say that everything you need to know is in the first teaser: reality experiences technical difficulties; mind-bending stunts and high-stakes action scenes ensue; Leonardo DiCaprio wears an “Oh Christ, not this shit again” expression for two-and-a-half hours; and you can expect to be engaged on cerebral levels not normally associated with the cinematic experience.
And that’s the other thing Inception relies on: its uniqueness. It rockets along so fast you can barely keep a grip on the fraying threads of the rug before it’s ripped out from under you for the umpteenth time; it moves so fast that you barely have time to register that it’s kind of like The Matrix, it’s kind of like that video game Psychonauts, and it’s kind of like that episode of Lost, “The Constant.” It moves so fast that it forces you to use that wrinkly grey sponge between your ears, and it banks on you not having experienced anything quite like it before – at least, not at the movies.
For the most part, the film works. It takes a while to get going, and spends an inordinate and ultimately superfluous amount of time building rules and disgorging exposition (albeit in innovative ways), but after about the halfway point, Inception kicks into gear and takes your flying rug into outer space.
Christopher Nolan is nothing if not a cinematic perfectionist. Every shot, every cut, every sound effect and musical cue is distinctly Nolan-ish: the sound design is sharp and punchy, the visuals are moody and gorgeous, the music is as subtle as a brick and twice as threatening, and the performances are exemplary across the board. In fact, the only real problem here is the script.
I’m all for taking the formula and breaking it over one’s knee; I enjoy an unpredictable and head-scratching romp as much as the next person (assuming the next person is, give or take, identical to me). But in order to make that work, there needs to be a constant sense of purpose for the characters; the audience needs to understand every single scene on an emotional level, at the very least – like how in Memento we were reminded at the start of every scene what was at stake, where we were, and what we had left to do.
Inception throws in too many elements for the narrative to work seamlessly (spoilers follow): the dead wife, the clunky exposition, the disjointed rollercoaster of a climax, it was all too much – by about the halfway mark, I was following Cillian Murphy’s character (instead of DiCaprio’s) as my primary narrative conduit. Then I had to switch back to DiCaprio – just in time to not give a damn about his peculiar and strangely un-compelling predicament. (End spoilers)
So Inception is a victim of its own ambition. There is so much going on that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of; too often, exposition is ladled out in frustratingly small packets so that you only just manage to keep abreast of why the characters are being shot at, and by whom. Conversely, the benefit of this over-ambition is exemplified in the much-anticipated topsy-turvy hallway fight scene (incidentally rugless): the film is so busy, so tight, and so frenetic, that this scene positively crackles with cinematic energy; everything that follows struggles to maintain that level of intensity.
One element that worked for me, and kept me interested throughout the film’s long (but brisk) running time, was the way the film’s narrative works as an allegory for filmmaking itself. Building false realities for people, suspending their disbelief, and using familiar geographical and characteristic archetypes to do it, all designed to channel the “victim” / dreamer towards a preordained goal or experience – doesn’t that sound a bit like filmmaking to you? Filmmaking in particular, but art in general, I suppose.
My biggest gripe with the movie is the way Nolan concerns himself more with the rug than with the people on it. The “twist ending,” in particular, reeks of his reluctance to provide satisfying emotional closure to any of his characters’ journeys. I get it — it’s cerebral, it’s subtle, it makes clever use of cinematic techniques to subvert your expectations — I get it; it just doesn’t work for me.
Ultimately, these few small flaws recede into the shining surface of the film, a monolith that exhibits almost magisterial power over its audience: you’d be hard-pressed to find yourself bored with Inception. Some elements may not engage your interest as much as others (such as Marion Cotillard’s character, for me), but there’s enough variety and energy to keep most viewers glued to the screen even as Nolan builds up his next exercise in rug-torture. My only wish is that the film tied itself together, instead of contenting itself with pulling the rug out from under you just one last time.
Inception
