SCREENINGS,
READINGS & MEANINGS
Gerald
Schmitz
Inception:
a midsummer dream to entrance the senses
Inception
(UK/US 2010)
. . .
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
— Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Inception begins almost at the end, with a man in a dark suit and a
gun tucked into the back of his pants washing up on a sandy shore. Next
he’s inside an Oriental villa, sitting across from an elderly
man who asks: “Have you come to kill me?” A curious curved
metal top spins on the table. Are we inside someone’s dream, or
nightmare?
Imagine a near future. The armed man is Dom Cobb, an expert in corporate
espionage of another kind. He’s a crack “extractor”
able to enter the subconscious mind of subjects in a dream state and
steal secrets that they’ve locked away. He’s also an American
in exile, a fugitive accused of killing his wife Mal, haunted by her
in his dreams and longing to be able to return to his two young children
whose faces he cannot see. The elderly man is an aged version of a Japanese
tycoon, Saito, who has promised Cobb personal redemption if he succeeds
in the mission impossible task of “inception” — not
heisting but implanting an idea (“the hardest virus to kill”)
into the mind of wary subject Robert Fischer, heir to a rival business
empire, so that he will believe it to be his own thought.
The troubled thief Cobb is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a titanic
head-throbbing performance. This isn’t the smiling blue-eyed DiCaprio
who graced the cover of the June issue of Reader’s Digest for
his commitment to environmental causes (www.leonardodicaprio.com). It’s
more like the anguished brooding character from Scorsese’s Shutter
Island, but with gun-blazing verve and daring. Dead wife Mal, who only
appears as dreaded memory projections in his dreams, is moodily played
by French actress Marion Cotillard (another of the Digest’s “green
power” stars, see www.marion-cotillard.org) who won an Oscar for
portraying legendary chanteuse Edith Piaf in La vie en rose (2007).
After the opening scene, Cobb is in the middle of an operation gone
sour that proves fatal for his “architect” of dreams Nash
(Lukas Haas). Dodging killers, he encounters the middle-aged Saito (the
great Ken Watanabe) who offers protection and the proposition he can’t
resist — a real jail-free life with his children. In return Cobb
must make the target, Fischer (Cillian Murphy), want to break up the
mega-corporation of his dying father (Pete Postlethwaite) to prevent
it from achieving global dominance.
To pull off the attempted inception, Cobb needs to replace Nash in a
dream team that includes his right-hand assistant Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
He first goes to see his professor father-in-law Miles (Sir Michael
Caine)
in Paris. (Kudos to aging working thespians. Canadian Christopher Plummer,
who introduced the Queen on Parliament Hill July 1, is currently drawing
raves for his Stratford role of Prospero in The Tempest. Recall that
Caine served as Batman’s loyal valet in writer-director Christopher
Nolan’s similarly smashing 2008 summer blockbuster The Dark Knight.
DiCaprio’s upcoming lead role is in octogenarian Clint Eastwood’s
next project, Hoover, on the FBI’s notorious longtime boss.)
Miles introduces Cobb to ace student Ariadne (Canadian Ellen Page) whose
name conjures up the labyrinthine ways of Greek mythology. Passing her
audition of sketching an insoluble maze in seconds, she becomes the
new architect of shared dreamscapes to control the mental universe of
the sleeping subject. In Mombassa, Cobb finds a chemist Yusuf (Dileep
Rao) to administer a sedative so powerful it can go “three levels
down” — to a dream within a dream within a dream, with increasing
danger of being trapped in an endless subconscious “limbo.”
The team is completed by the abrasive Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger of
personas, able to metamorphose into Browning (Tom Berenger), adviser
and confidante to the Fischers.
Dream time races much faster than real time, which can be good or bad.
Ariadne learns that Dom and Mal spent 50 years growing old together
in limbo. She was his first desperate try at inception. Both dying to
escape, she could not believe waking life was real, hence his guilt
over her suicide. To emerge from the depths of dreaming requires a “kick”
accompanied by a sensation of falling and announced by music —
what else but Edith Piaf’s Je ne regrette rien. Another thing,
each member of the team carries a “totem,” a small object
to determine whether one is in a conscious state. Cobb’s is the
spinning top connected to Mal. If it falls over he’s back to reality.
But what happens when one dies within a dream?
The inception job is a supremely dangerous continent-hopping caper requiring
more than one “leap of faith.” The appropriately named Mal
continuously appears among the deadly subconscious defences in human
form thrown up by the slumbering target. Pinch yourself to remember
you are watching everything from inside Robert Fischer’s manipulated
layered dream after he’s put under in the first-class cabin of
a 10-hour US-bound flight. The key turns on a misunderstood relationship
with his father. The intrigue penetrates multiple levels of intricately
visualized psycho-drama.
Sheer moviemaking artifice on steroids, I saw Inception in the Imax version. But even without, it’s a pretty awesome ride: enough shootouts, chases and exploding landscapes to give Jason Bourne or James Bond a run for their money; mesmerizing mind-bending special effects like a city folding in on itself; the excruciatingly slow-motion descent of a van and its sleeping occupants into the waters of limbo.
Inception, while not quite a masterpiece (despite its 9.4/10 rating
on the Internet Movie Database, vaulting it into No. 3 on the all-time
great movies list), is the most intelligently satisfying blockbuster
since The Dark Knight, and a personal triumph for Nolan before he tackles
the next Batman episode. The 39-year-old came up with the idea as a
teenager and wrote a screenplay years before he had the studio backing
and budget to indulge such a fantastical story — one with enough
clever surrealist allusions to classic films for one to write a thesis,
yet enjoyable as a superior action thriller.
Recently I watched again Nolan’s breakout feature Memento, a cult
favourite (No. 29 on the IMDB list) from a decade ago, about a man with
no short-term memory, also obsessed with a wife who died violently.
Its fractured narrative runs backward from a possible end, and however
baffling, is never less than compulsively absorbing. Suppose “life
is but a dream” that we can never stand outside of to be truly
sure of what is real. What undiscovered worlds may lie within the realm
of sleep, the science of which remains a mysterious puzzle? How much
more so the frontiers of dreams?
Inception looks and sounds so amazing that its 148 minutes fly by. Dom
Cobb is in the dream-throes of a mighty struggle. The beach scene with
old man Saito recurs. The plane is about to land, the van is underwater
and then everyone gets the kick to awake. The top keeps spinning . .
.
We all wish for happy endings. But in life as in dreams nothing is certain and much surpasses human understanding. We need to take leaps of faith without knowing. Perhaps all takes place within Cobb’s disturbed subconscious as the only reality he has left to hang on to.
Remember the lines preceding those most famous ones of Prospero in The
Tempest:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
. . . the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
Inception will not only entrance your senses, it will have you racking
your brains if not kicking yourself. But not too much, I hope. This
is, after all, a midsummer Hollywood dream.
Schmitz is a member of the Sundance festival’s patron circle
and an ambassador member of the Canadian Film Institute.
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