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Directed by Christopher Nolan’s
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Inception Christopher
Nolan’s new film “Inception” – and I’m not sure
what that title means – is about a man who can worm his way into
people’s dreams, create a reality based on the dream, and then find out
the secrets that the dream is disguising. As you can imagine it’s
dangerous work; sometimes the dreams involve him, and he has to go along with
his subject. He can make gravity
go sideways, bend streets and buildings into new shapes, stage car crashes,
and more – anything, in fact, that can be dreamed can be staged as
well. He has a group of
confederates who work with him on all his assignments. The
man is of course Leonardo DiCaprio, named Cobb
here, and he is a man with a desperate background of his own. His marriage to Marion Cotillard, named Mal here – has given him two
beautiful children whom he can’t quite get back to when he wants. In the meantime he finds Ariadne (Ellen Page, grown up since “Juno”)
an architect who can design a maze that his target will be put in the middle
of once we are in his dream. The
target is the heir to an industrial fortune, and Cobb’s client wants to
plant in his head the irresistible idea that he will split up the company and
sell it, thus removing a competitor from the field. In
a sense the plot is less important than the images of the film, as Cobb and
his group move through cities, hotels and other likely places, fighting off
various forces by means of gravity shifts – you can do anything in a
dream, evidently – that are fascinating to watch, particularly a fight
through a hotel corridor in which up is down or sideways, people float
through the air, and – dreamlike – there is no real resolution to
the fight. There is a fascinating
episode in a 747 that’s going to be in the air for ten hours, flying to
Los Angeles, in which Cobb and his – I want to say Merry Men –
keep the target in a state of dreamland while they implant the seed of
selling his company. It’s
interesting that because “Inception” is a dream rather than
reality, all the conventional tropes of action movies – the fights, the
switches of place, the revelations – don’t have the impact that
they would have if they were real; it’s just another dream, we can wake
up from it and forget it afterwards.
That doesn’t mean that “Inception” is a bad film;
the experience of viewing it is as powerful as though it were real, and there
are even a number of subliminal references to other films – James Bond,
Alfred Hitchcock – and one lovely piece on the sound track; it’s
of Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf singing “Je
ne regrette rien.” Christopher Nolan has made
“Inception” all that “Memento” was not, and while
you’re watching it you will have a very good time. |