The world of Christopher Nolan's Inception is at first glance a few degrees closer to our own than the murky, stylized vision of Gotham City that Nolan brought to the Batman films. Inception takes place in a not-too-distant future where the technology exists for shared dreaming, a sort of communal mind trip that is bewitching participants for hours on end in third world countries. Who else participates in shared dreaming? In this bleak Hollywood summer, maybe studio executives should do more of it. We're never told who developed the technology or why, and Nolan obviously isn't interested. Underneath the trippy visuals and multiple plotlines Nolan is after something much pulpier and less complicated.
Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team orchestrate and then plunder the dreams of others in search of corporate secrets; another thing we never know is who Cobb works for. The team is hired by an energy tycoon named Saito (Ken Wantanabe) to infiltrate the mind of Fisher,a rival (Cillian Murphy), and persuade him to break up his company. "Inception" is the name given to the dicey technique of planting an idea in a subject's subconscious. The job requires travel through multiple levels of Fisher's dreams, with rules and limitations explained in great detail. If Cobb is successful Saito can reunite him with his children; Cobb has been on the run since being wrongly implicated in the suicide of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard in an impossible role), who has the annoying habit of popping up in dreams as a projection of Cobb's subconscious. To buy into Inception one must not only follow the rules that Nolan lays out but also forget our modern understanding of dreams. The dreams in Inception aren't a collection of metaphorically represented desires or buried traumas, but rather carefully designed worlds through which Cobb can lead his subjects to a key piece of information. Cobb's subconscious keeps bursting in; he keeps seeing Mal and his children. But no one else on Cobb's crew must have any issues, because we don't see any clowns chasing his sidekick Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) or a spider menacing his architect Ariadne (Ellen Page). Ariadne designs the dream worlds and functions as the audience's surrogate. She asks plenty of questions and extracts a good deal of exposition from Cobb, who is screwed up in ways no one else seems to have noticed. Page brings her intelligence and considerable charm to bear on the role but Ariadne is a cog, designed to articulate what's at stake and provide insight into Cobb that the movie doesn't have time to explain through dramatic action.
There are truly arresting images in Inception: Page and DiCaprio sit in a cafe as books and vegetables explode around them; Cobb and his team, still dreaming, plummet slowly backwards as their van heads for the water. My favorite was a footbridge that assembled itself before Ariadne, since she's the one character in the film that's good at something that the audience can understand. Let's return to that van, since its fall off a bridge (after a chase away from gunmen "defending" Fisher's subconscious) takes up what feels like a good portion of the movie's last act. The difference between dream time and real time is discussed at length, but again not clearly dramatized. We're told Ariadne has been asleep for five minutes, but to her it feels like an hour and in fact it's somewhere in between. With the action ping-ponging between three different settings, Nolan captures that slowly building feeling of dread as a dream spins out of control. To what end? Without giving too much away, Inception really isn't a movie about dreams one has while asleep but about the dreams we construct while awake. The key image of the movie is a dollhouse with a child's top spinning inside. The dream world of Mal's marriage wasn't enough for her, and Cobb's guilt over that fact motivates everything that happens afterwards.
Inception is Christopher Nolan's third science-fiction film about a haunted man after The Prestige and Memento. While Nolan's imagination has gotten bigger his thematic concerns haven't. Those looking for the the easy revenge fantasies of the Batman films will be disappointed, but so might those who were expecting something more than a sentimental love story.
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