Artfully Stunning, Ambitiously Complex Sci-Fi Thriller Shows Nolan's Reach May Just Exceed His Grasp

Rating: 8/10 (26 July 2010)

Empathy turns out to be the biggest challenge that filmmaker Christopher Nolan faces in his audaciously intricate, sometimes confounding 2010 sci-fi action thriller. It's a 148-minute somersault of a ride viscerally engaging in its vivid elaboration of lucid dreaming. Ironically, there is little time to feel for the characters involved when the whole point of the movie is that nothing is meant to feel real. This dramatic dilemma is almost completely shouldered by the main protagonist Dom Cobb, a professional thief specializing in corporate espionage whose sharpened gifts as an "extractor" allows him to enter the dreams of others to obtain information that is otherwise inaccessible. Heading up a "Mission: Impossible"-type task force, Cobb has become a "Shane"-like solitary figure whose talents have cost him his family. He wants nothing more than to see the faces of his two young children.
The movie wastes no time in giving Cobb a final mission, his one last shot at redemption which will allow him to reunite with his family back in the states. A Japanese tycoon named Saito wants Cobb to perform an act of "inception" in which he would plant an idea in the subconscious of Robert Fischer Jr., the son of a corporate rival who is about to inherit his father's energy conglomerate. Saito wants Fischer to dissolve the company to prevent the corporation's inevitable takeover of global energy resources, but Cobb's participation represents a risky maneuver that conjures up memories of his dead wife Mal. She figures in the dream episodes in unexpected ways that invariably cloud Cobb's judgment in executing upon the mission for Saito. A crack team has been assembled to aid Cobb - Arthur, the point man who researches the targets whose dreams will be infiltrated; Eames, a cocky forger who has the ability to change identities inside dreams; Yusuf, a chemist who has developed the powerful sedatives that take Cobb and crew into the dream state; and Ariadne, a preternaturally talented graduate student whom Cobb and Arthur train as their new architect.
As both writer and director, Nolan methodically bends the storyline into a labyrinth that turns out to be circular in structure and contains at least four layers of dreams in which the task force must tag team in order to wake up to the next higher level until they each face reality. This is easier said than done since he attempts to show the unconscious as a supremely unruly place where nothing ultimately makes sense, and that's the film's major conundrum since it demands that the narrative must make some amount of sense to make the viewer feel engaged with the story being told. Leonardo DiCaprio brings his trademark intensity to Dom and manages a gravitas that helps ground the story at a human level, even when the plot convolutions get more and more elaborate and far-fetched. There are some impressive CGI set-pieces like the street of Paris folding over like an omelet, a train careening down a busy downtown street, and the eerie sight of a vacant city in a virtual limbo. Other scenes border on the silly like Arthur's fight scene amid a rotating hotel that make him look like he's doing a "2001" riff on Fred Astaire's classic dance routine in "Royal Wedding", or the way Ariadne precociously diagnoses the solutions to fatalistic dreams like an worldly scholar.
By no means does the approach translate into ineffectual performances by the rest of the eclectic cast. It's just that the actors reflect the generally poker-faced manner expected within the sci-fi genre. Joseph Gordon-Levitt ("500 Days of Summer") plays Arthur just that way as does Ken Watanabe ("The Last Samurai") appropriately inscrutable as Saito. Ellen Page ("Juno") neutralizes her naturally sardonic manner to play up Ariadne's naïve curiosity, but to her defense, she has some of the clunkiest dialogue to deliver. Tom Hardy and Dileep Rao fare better as Eames and Yusuf, respectively simply because they play plot devices more than people. Cillian Murphy ("Breakfast on Pluto") channels his usually intimidating intensity into Fischer's deceptively becalming manner, while an almost unrecognizable Tom Berenger manages to play his father's loyal associate with welcome gusto. As Mal, Marion Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose") has by far the film's most challenging role, maintaining a careful balance between a spectral figure of longing for Cobb and a manipulative femme fatale.
As one would expect from a Nolan film, all the production details are exquisite. Wally Pfister's astonishing cinematography contributes immeasurably to the film's overall hypnotic effect, and Hans Zimmer's foreboding, percussive score thrusts the drama forward with momentum. This movie is too startling a work to ignore, but it would be disingenuous to say that this venture reflects a grand vision since the story is basically an elaborate heist movie. Everything is so well thought out that Nolan may have inadvertently prevented his audience from feeling the full emotional impact of the ending despite the superb editing job by Lee Smith that juggles all the concurrent dreams together. This is still masterful filmmaking from someone who could have focused a tad less on technique and a tad more on the untamed heart that really alters the order within our dreams.