The release of Inception has made July an exciting time, for film critics if no one else. Possibly the best show of the summer has been the extended critical reenactment of a Forrest Gump ping pong match, as hype and backlash whip back and forth at electron velocities. I’ve had enough time to mull over Nolan’s subconscious heist flick to tell you that it’s not much good, and that you should go see it.
Inception is the story of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a thief who extracts information from people’s minds by inserting himself into people’s dreams. Cobb is a man of sorrows, an exiled and fugitive soul with a criminal charge hanging over his head and a family in America to whom he desperately wishes to return. Like crafty Odysseus, he wanders the world and he’s really good at cunning stratagems. Unlike Odysseus, he speaks English and enters your dreams through drugs.
Cobb is offered one last job with a promise of being able to return to America. Instead of a standard extraction job, though, this is inception, the far more difficult task of planting an idea in someone’s mind, an idea so deep that the subject embraces it wholly (although I can’t figure out why this should be so difficult – really, just put a commercial on the air and play it fifty times a day). In order to achieve this surprisingly difficult task, Cobb and his team create multiple dreams-within-dreams, all of which move at ever-slower rates of time – the ratio appears to be around 1:20 1:12, so that five minutes in reality is an hour in dreamtime, which turns into twelve hours in the next dream, which then becomes six days in the next, and so on. At the bottom of all these recursive levels lies limbo, an id-like unstructured dream space, where all bets are off and dreamers can wander forever. (UPDATE: commenter Nick has noted that my math is wonky. The problem is that I wrote 1:20 when I actually meant 1:12, then forgot that I meant 1:12 and so on. All fixed now. Thank you Nick, for paying attention).
The logarithmic expansion of time is only one of the many rules governing Inception’s world. And you get to hear about nearly every one of these rules, as Nolan spends about an hour of running time stuffing exposition into the mouths of various characters. Did I say characters? There are no characters per se in Inception, beyond Cobb. He is the only figure in the movie with an inner life, which Nolan, with blinkered literalmindedness, actually films. Basically he does with po-faced solemnity and mortal rigor what Kaufman and Gondry did with supreme brio in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
You could argue that the mark upon whom inception is being performed – a nicely cheekboned scion of wealth named Fischer, played by Cillian Murphy – has an inner life as well, but it is purely instrumental and lifeless as a bank safe. Fischer’s daddy issues contain less drama than the spinning of dials and falling of hammers. Incidentally, Inception is full of vaults and safes, and they’re freighted with Jungian import, but Nolan robs us of the pleasure of watching someone physically crack one. The fact that he borrows so many elements from classic heist films but neglects one of its most pleasurable possibilities is emblematic of Inception’s problems.
Most positive reactions have been generous or wise enough to point out the obvious flaws with the film, particularly characterization, but for some reason they’ve heaped praise on the multi-layered heist scene. Nolan sets the last hour of the film on several different levels of dream, with various characters attempting to synchronize their activities along different rates of time. A sequence that takes a few seconds on one level of dream takes several minutes on the next level, several hours on the level below, and so forth. This time dilation has been hailed as innovative, fresh, genius and so on.
What no one points out is that it’s nonsense. Heist movies rely on crosscutting between groups of characters synchronizing their actions to pull off a complicated move. The thrill for the audience springs from the tension of whether they can pull it off, and key to that tension is being able to understand clearly what the stakes are, who’s doing what, why they’re doing it. A good heist film bakes in an efficient exposition scene in which the characters go over the plan. Usually the planning stages are intercut with the execution, which is a delightful exercise in demonstrating the power of film editing to manipulate time.
I’ll go over that last phrase: the power of film editing to manipulate time. A cut in film presupposes that shots in sequence are also contiguous in time, unless a cue of some kind is provided (I’m sure someone can contest this notion, so feel free to argue the point in the comments). Being able to play with that expectation is as basic to film as playing with meter is to poetry. You see, we don’t really need all these shifting time levels in Inception because cinema already makes time its bitch. Nolan’s pocket-watch dreamscape is a device that justifies a van falling from a bridge for thirty minutes. At no point is there a genuine sense that the action at the lowest level of the dream, a mountain snow fortress with a pack of security guards left over from a Roger Moore-era Bond flick, is moving any more slowly than the action at the hotel level above. Only the ostentatious slo-mo of the van dropping into the water and occasional updates from characters – “it’s five minutes above, so that give us twenty minutes here” – attempt to sell the action and amp up the tension. If there’s any real inception in Inception, it’s Nolan attempting to plant an idea in our minds that this his brilliant idea is anything more than a gimmick that takes up the last hour of the film. Of course, this could be some kind of commentary on the experience of time in cinema, but if you’re looking for that kind of film, try Chris Marker, whose La Jetee will blow your mind in twelve quick and beautiful minutes.
Despite my complaints, there are many things to like about Inception. The films looks utterly beautiful, and some of the setpieces, particularly Joseph Gordon-Levitt fighting his way through a hotel hallway with shifting gravity, are amazing to watch. The mystery of Cobb and the way in which his subconscious keeps invading the dreamspace, particularly in the form of his wife Mal, is intriguing, if a little overcooked. And some parts of the film will keep you talking, and arguing, and thinking, and pondering, for days. Surely that’s worth something.
Go see Inception, because it’s the first original action thriller I can remember in years. Because it’s not in 3D. Because the actors make a meal out of thin gruel. Go and make up your mind, because even flawed films like this are better another Chipmunks sequel. I believe that Nolan has better films than Inception in his future, and I will keep putting money down until he gets there.
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