Inception

"A man possessed of some radical notions..."

Have you ever seen the logo for Christopher Nolan’s production company, SYNCOPY?

It’s a maze, but actually it’s two mazes, one on top of the other, and it’s solvable if you use passageways in the letters to get through it. You have to ‘faint’ to make it to the end. (The name is a play on the medical term syncope, as well as, the music term syncopation.) Nolan insists that his movies don’t need to be understood as much as felt. Yes, there's a maze but maybe it's a better experience if you distance yourself from your compulsion to solve it. Turn off your analytical brain and just be wowed already. To that end, if you let Inception wash over you, it is quite a ride.

This review contains spoilers!

Inception is a story about a team of spies who steal corporate secrets and information from the inside of someone's dream. But manipulating the dream world has many layers of threats, not least of all the fact that we can't control our subconscious. And now, team leader, Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio), can no longer execute a job without being chased by his own demons, to the detriment of the team. His wife (played by Marion Cotillard) died by unusual circumstances and he is the number one suspect. His guilt takes her form while he's trying to work. After a botched dream heist for a competing corporation, Cobb is forced under the thumb of Saito (the perpetually cool Ken Watanabe), who has an outrageous proposition. With his life is at a crossroads, Cobb is offered ONE LAST JOB, one that will clear his name and allow him to be reunited with his kids. But, he has to do the impossible to pull it off: incept an idea in target Robert Fischer Jr.'s mind. (Fischer is played by Nolan darling, Cillian Murphy.) And not just any idea, but one that is powerful enough to set Fischer's life course on a different path, where he breaks up his father's empire.

True inspiration's impossible to fake.

Welcome to a world that's so high stakes and dangerous, you need your own totem to make sure you're not in someone else's dream. Or so that you haven't forgotten you are dreaming. What hasn't been said about Inception, already? Probably not much but this movie continues to age very well. For a director who can sometimes get in his own way, the ideas behind this movie are so immaculate and heart-on-your-sleeve earnest that I fear I am endeared to it forever. The most resilient parasite.

Is true inspiration impossible to fake or can a subject have an idea given to them, as their own, with just the right planning and all the right circumstances? What's more, the idea MUST be simple! And emotional! And positive! Arthur (played with old world gentlemanly charm by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is a good foil to Cobb's recklessness and tunnel vision, is sure that this can't be done. (Arthur is a paradox, he worries relentlessly about the danger of this work but is also drawn to it.) But there is no time for what ifs, rather it's time to put together a team. Ariadne (played by Elliot Page), a new architect who might be better than Cobb, Eames (Tom Hardy), an old hat at some of the more unconventional aspects of the heist, and Yusef (Dileep Rao), a chemist skilled enough to sedate the team, (but leave the inner-ear's sensitivity!) for a job that requires them to travel three layers deep into the dream state.

No idea is simple when you need to plant it into someone's mind.

The mission unravels quickly and spectacularly when Cobb's former wife starts messing with Ariadne's impeccable design. (A freight train barreling down the middle of a Los Angeles street, anyone?) Plus, Robert Fischer Jr. has had training in dream espionage and his dream projections carry automatic weapons. Saito is shot, but with this much sedation, he won't wake up, which is the usual convention to getting out of the dream missions easily. It is here we learn about limbo and also about the art of improvisation. But let's first talk about limbo and how no one but Cobb knew about it! Any director who only cared about their ability to engineer a perfect puzzle box would just simply not have LIMBO in this movie. (Limbo is another dream space, one with an even more blurred experience of the time/space continuum.) The idea is ludicrous, preposterous and utterly bonkers. Screenwriters call it double mumbo jumbo and it was frequently a term the Lost writers debated back in the day. Your audience can cross one bridge to an idea but not two. To me, it's the ultimate sign that Nolan really does want us to turn off our rational brains. We are already waist deep in a world where your subconscious is so unruly, you can't even keep your dead wife out of someone else's dream! As the mission demands change and takes new shape, all of our spies are forced to improvise. A lot! In increasingly creative ways! It's almost like Nolan was telling our spy team to turn off what they know, too.

Do you want to take a leap of faith?

The job proves to be revelatory, for all involved. Even Eames, who was very upset by the whole limbo situation, to the degree he almost bailed, was genuinely hoping to see how this whole thing turns out. Nolan does favor hopeful endings in his own way. I always smile at the faces of that first class cabin at the baggage claim at LAX, especially Murphy's Fischer who is doing this vaguely Wizard of Oz "But it wasn't a dream, it was a place and you and you and you and you were there." So is Cobb's totem still spinning after the movie cuts to black? I guess that depends on what you think a happy ending is, in this case. Have you been watching a movie where Cobb getting home to his kids is only a success if it happens in the waking realm?

Non-linear thoughts:

*DO NOT get into an elevator with Leo DiCaprio. He will tell you something he should have told you before and now it's too late!

*Actually don't listen to Cobb AT ALL. He's a real 'do as I say, not as I do' kind of guy.

*The set pieces in this movie are, at times, awe-inspiring and so creative. The spinning hotel and the scenes where the layers of the dream above the one they're in (!) are collapsing thus imposing their physics on the layer below are really imaginative. Personally, I love the effect of slow motion when the team is asleep in the van and driving though chaos. Is it because they're asleep, yet one or two layers deeper, and their bodies are experiencing the movement through space differently? Or is it just aesthetically cool as hell? It happens in the opening when Cobb gets the kick into the bathtub, too.

*The character of Ariadne is such a breath of fresh air! The least burdened one. Watching Ariadne experience the first taste of being an architect in a world without the limits of physics is really fun.

*Eames, as the insouciant, hard-to-ruffle 'forger' on the team is also a standout. He's a 'what you see is what you get' type which is another lovely paradox when you consider his job.

*The scene where they all wake up, on the plane, after the job, manages to be really emotional. It might be the score, it might the happy sleepy expressions that they pulled the whole thing off.

*The score is infamous, at this point, earning its own sort of trademark sound: the 'BRAAAM.' Also, Edith Piaf's "Non Je Ne Regrette Rien" isn't just being played when someone needs to be alerted that it's time to wake up, composer Hans Zimmer did absolutely perverse (complimentary) things with the melody throughout, even slowing it down to where it's barely recognizable.

*Nolan said that the last shot's edit took days. He and editor Lee Smith agonized exactly where to cut.

*Inception was made in between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Add to that The Prestige between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and Nolan made five movies in seven years and every one of them was colossal.

*I don't think I have ever written a review with this many commas, re-read / re-written / tweaked this or that, and still I'm not satisfied! The Nolan effect!

For the sheer imagination and effort, alone...

Four out of four pinwheels in a safe.

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