There is an entire industry built around the attempt to understand dreams, an industry that would be bigger and more mainstream if such a thing were actually possible. The truth is you can keep any number of interpretive books on your nightstand and notepads and pens handy to write thoughts down with and still never get to the heart of what the nether regions of your mind are trying to tell you. Lucid dreams–ones in which the dreamer is aware he or she is dreaming, and can sometimes even manipulate the dream–are the closest we get to presenting the subconscious mind in a way the conscious one can grasp. Inception, the latest film from director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento), lives in the lucid dream, and while his sprawling story of mental espionage and a widowed father’s only chance at redemption is both commendable and compelling–it may be the best movie of the year so far–it chooses to ignore one important truth: The human subconscious is a dark, messed up place to tell a story.
In the world of this movie, the United States military develops technology with which it can induce sleep in a group of people and, with the help of a portable device that fits in a suitcase, all of them can end up in the lucid dreamscape of one of the sleepers to try and extract information from that person. Basically, it’s the most passive form of interrogation ever conceived. (Already the plot is reaching quite a bit, though it must be said that if the U.S. military can turn Flipper into a killing machine then anything is possible, really.) Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed, Gangs of New York… okay, he was in Titanic) plays Dom Cobb, the best in the world at “extraction,” the process of going into someone’s dreams to get that one piece of information a person would never, ever tell you. Who else could want such technology? Mega-high-budget corporations spying on one another; these are Cobb’s contract employers. When one such high-dollar, high-risk heist goes wrong his mark (played by a very hard-to-understand Ken Watanabe) becomes his new boss, offering Cobb a cleared criminal record and a way back into the States to be with his kids if he just does this one little thing that’s supposedly impossible: Plant a thought in the mind of an heir to a corporate empire, getting him to dissolve his father’s business–and make this heir believe it was his idea all along.
Sploosh, sploosh.
What follows is a mixture of Ocean’s 11, The Matrix and In Dreams, with Cobb and his team of helpers diving not one but three levels into the subconscious of young heir Robert Fischer, Jr., played by Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Red Eye), to try and execute their plan–in other words, they induce a dream… within a dream… within another dream. Here’s where Nolan’s brilliant high-wire act of storytelling begins, as by the time you follow the crew to the top of a snowy mountain you’re following three stories simultaneously. Lots of directors have tried the story-within-a-story approach and failed spectacularly at it, and that was just with two stories usually. Nolan, his set designer and visual effects crew put together three radically different environments that don’t ignore one another or their respective story arcs; in fact, what happens at one level of subconscious has magnified effects in each lower level. Falling from a height in one level will feel like zero gravity in the level below it and falling into a bathtub will send an aquatic avalanche into the room you’re standing in one dream-level down. All of this makes for epic visuals, particularly as Ariadne, played by Ellen Page (Juno), learns how to manipulate dreamscapes during her training as the “architect” of the dream the crew will enter in Fischer’s mind. Physics, space and time slip away as you watch Paris literally fold on top of itself like a city turned calzone. It’s mind-bending, literally and figuratively.
The idea of the dream “architect” is a little outlandish, but acceptable in context–Cobb can no longer build believable dreamscapes because the figure of his dead wife haunts his, so he has someone else create the lucid not-realities–but the problem comes in what the architect designs. See, in spite of all the folding, bursting and flooding, these lucid dreamscapes seem so, well, normal. There is none of the horrifying randomness that comes in actual dreaming; instead, what we see in the real world is mirrored exactly. For example, in lucid dreams the dreamer can look for telltale signs they are dreaming, such as text that reads differently or blurry on second glance. Where is that in this movie? Or maybe an out-of-place face, person or happening? Are dream “architects” too good for that stuff? Does being a maze-building genius mean such a person isn’t subject to the whims of the subconscious mind? It’s a stretch to believe this once you think about it, but it’s a necessary sacrifice, if you will, in order to keep a Hollywood movie acceptable to a Hollywood movie’s audience. In other words, don’t get crazy, scary or otherwise lose the plot thread.
There’s one other Hollywood intrusion that tries to muck up Inception: The stereotypical Love Interest, in this case Cobb’s dead wife, played by Marion Cotillard (Public Enemies, Big Fish) who continues to haunt Cobb’s dream worlds and sabotage his work. She is his greatest obstacle in the movie, but the truth is her character comes off as one-dimensional and uninteresting. In a movie where characters can float through air and manipulate their physical realm, all she seems able to do is huff and occasionally stab someone you don’t want her to. She’s a plot device and little more. What reels her back into relevance, really, is DiCaprio, who gives an insane-sounding movie (go ahead and read the second paragraph of this review again and see) with a hackneyed lost-love subplot the titanium-strong link it needs to hold everything together. The fear and desperation one sees in Cobb is the realest thing in any of the alternate realities he drifts in and out of, as well as an interesting counterpoint to the cool hand and quick wit he must show during his heists. That these opposites serve to undermine each other should come as no surprise.
While it (necessarily) has some tuned-down elements required of any big-budget Hollywood flick, what Nolan has crafted is a movie with lasting visuals and a plot that is both riveting and thought-provoking. It’s not how dreams really go, but that’s what David Lynch movies are for. This, instead, is an internal epic, a movie as claustophobic as it is sweeping, one that goes everywhere while never leaving the darkness you see when you close your eyes.
