Impeccably constructed mechanics of hazy blurs

Rating: Null/10 (2 November 2010)

I wonder how many different ways will Nolan find around making a heist movie. Whereas the average heist film basically makes a statement that hits a mark around "crime doesn't pay", a Nolan film at some point feels the need to peel back the heist film as an irrelevancy that no longer serves a purpose to give us catharsis and soaring emotional crescendos. Yet he makes his catharsis the same way he makes his heist movie framing devices, mechanical and calculated and 'movie-like'.
For all the hoo hah of philosophical ambition about boxes inside boxes, this is still a movie where a plot is set in motion by characters saying things like "we had to deliver Saito's expansion plans to Cobol Engineering two hours ago" and where a team is assembled to work for "some very very powerful people". In all this furrore the make juvenile mistakes. The heir to the most powerful energy conglomerate in the world apparently flies to Los Angeles not in his personal jet but on an airline owned by his competitor. The movie hinges its believability in abstract stratagems like "the subject's mind can always trace the genesis of that idea".
Like Shutter Island, I am bothered by this type of film that purports to speak at profound length about dreams and their mechanics, yet seems to understand nothing at all about dream logic. In Shutter Island dreams are tableaux of carefully constructed symbolism, detail planned in all the right spots to mean something. Inception is even less; dreams are vistas/levels of real world abstracted to a small degree. When a van tumbles over a bridge, the people dreaming inside that van find themselves bumping about in their dream! Where Scorsese's movie allowed for itself the failsafe of being able to claim that it's all a pastiche of 50's detective mysteries, Inception is a Nolan film so it must take itself thoroughly serious at every turn.
The Nolans are really masters of film structuralism, I can't take that away from them nor do I want to, they excel in this. They are great architects who make boxes carefully fit within other boxes, an elaborate maze to lose the viewer in, but their idea of trascending box and maze is to the force the viewer into submission by sheer volume of plot detail. I like how we're given fragments of images that pay off later but at the same time can't help but feel that, outside the mechanics of it, when it comes to emotional response, those fragments never really challenge our expectations. For more than two hours, Nolan symbolizes Leo's guilt on leaving a family behind by showing him unable to dream/remember the faces of his children, always seeing their backs. In the end he does, yet, again seemingly through that architectural need to create another narrative box, the film ends on the ambiguous note "is this another dream?" that betrays the emotional response of the character seeing his children's faces.
What annoys me most about this is two things though. That the movie seems content to give the impression that a villain, like a Minotaur in the far end of a labyrinth, inhabits the lowest level of the dream, closed in a hotel room of broken furniture, or a bleak cityscape of concrete buildings without features, and even characters who should know better refer to it in the third person like it actually exists down there as something more than a figment of Leo's subconscious.
And more importantly, that Nolan creates a very elaborate system of dreams within dreams and simultaneous narratives that hinge on the idea that dream time is condensed (I find this fascinating, that entire lives can be played out in the span of time it takes a van to tumble over a bridge), yet he only fills those boxes with the most banal and unimaginative action set pieces. Dream levels are in turns hazy aimless blurs of something that is very gray and very rainy, of characters running around in orangecolored corridors, of characters running around in the snow shooting guns at each other.
I'm not sure that Nolan could make a better movie even if he didn't have blockbuster expectations to fulfill or financial investments to protect, even with the ridiculous actions trimmed out, a dream version of Memento would not warrant Kubrick comparisons. For a generation that wasn't old enough to take the red pill ten years ago this should serve as a Matrix for the new decade, but when it comes to meaningfully capturing what it feels like to dream no one has yet to even rival Lynch.