In Media Res

Rating: 9/10 (14 October 2010)

Writing Inception must've entailed extraordinary deliberation, like working a Rubic's Cube while playing the guitar. In one of its most charming, and briefest, scenes, the film's protagonist auditions a young architect by putting it to her to draw a maze. Nolan does this to us with his own dazzling maze. We have to rely on him that he can lead us through. Nolan must've rewritten this narrative over and over, finding that every alteration wrinkled the entire cloth. And it's impervious to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that'd tell you nothing if you didn't know how it got there. And telling you how it got there would completely confuse you. The movie's all about procedure, struggling one's way through all-encompassing panes of reality and dream, reality inside dreams, dreams lacking reality. Like the protagonist of Nolan's Memento, the viewer of this awe-inspiring machine floats in phase and event, clarifying that you can never recall the start of a dream, and that dreams that feel as if to traverse hours may merely last a short time. And what if you're within another person's dream? How does your dream-time coordinate with theirs? What do you truly know? Cobb's a corporate raider of premier class. He penetrates the psyches of others to steal their thoughts, now hired by an influential tycoon for the opposite: Establishing an idea into a competitor's psyche, so efficiently he thinks it's his own. It's never been done before; our minds are as aware of external concepts as our immune system to toxins. Played by the compelling Ken Watanabe, the magnate makes him an irrebuttable proposal, one that'd resolve Cobb's banishment from home.
Cobb Amasses A Crew, Nolan depending on the well-established dealings of all caper films. We meet the people he'll need: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, his Man Friday; Tom Hardy, a virtuoso fraudster; Dileep Rao, a skillful biologist. And there's a greenhorn, Ariadne, the exceptional young architect, a genius spatial thinker. Cobb also goes to speak to his father-in-law Miles, who knows what he does and how. These days Michael Caine need simply show up and we presupposed he's more shrewd than any of the other characters. Talent. Cobb trains Ariadne in dream penetration, the skill of calculating dreams, traveling through them. Nolan is schooling us, too, while using the juncture for some of the movie's astounding effects. The most extraordinary plainly rolls a city back on itself like a textile spool.
Defending Watanabe's rival, the emotionally agile Cillian Murphy, are any amount of armed mercenaries, who may be working like the cerebral parallel of vaccine. They seem variously authentic and abstract, but whichever, they lead to myriad struggles, chases, explosions---all necessary and earned---like every other element of this drum-tight plot. Structures tip. Streets curl. Characters glide. What the movie's about resolves how Nolan casts it, how it looks, the score, mixing, titles, and how it's been released: As soon as you're involving dreams, the mind's capabilities are boundless. And so the magnitude of the film has to feel boundless, like you could go anywhere by the end. And yet, the one fantastical concept that the film submits, honestly, is the existence of a technology that lets you go into and cohabitate the same dream as someone else.
How can you truly protect yourself from being mistaken? We so often trust our feelings more than reason and good sense. The adventures reaches the real depth to which one can go within one's own subjectivity where one can no longer reliably or consistently discern between hallucination, memory, fantasy, dream, reality. When people say this is a movie about concepts, they really do literally mean concepts themselves: How ideas can revolutionize our deepest selves. How ideas, just someone muttering something to you a certain way at a certain time, can have a devious rudimentary impact like nothing else. Nolan slips in stimuli about the unrefined, immeasurable subconscious and how you simply cannot simulate genuine revelation, then fathoms the expanse of subconscious perpetuity and faking a genuine revelation.
The acting's fine all around because the film's so heavily plot-driven that the characters can only be rooted in the personalities the cast brings to the screen. And so they hear with their own ears, see with their own eyes. That said, I don't know what it means that Ellen Page's Ariadne was by far my favorite character. I think it's because she feels so much more like a real person than these black-suited, slick-haired gun-wielding super-thieves. Though like most caper films, even this telepresent one's intentionally shallow in emotional terms. Nolan aids us with an emotional strand. The reason Cobb's goaded to gamble with the perils of inception is owing to heartache and self-reproach involving his family. Marion Cotillard personifies the wife in a romanticized fashion with hues of unpredictable madness. Whether we're seeing Cobb's recollections or his dreams is complex to say, even, literally, by the last shot. Yet she works as an emotional inducement, and the love between the two affords an emotional continuum in Cobb's world, which is otherwise incessantly metamorphosing. We're always in the present. Concerns of life, death and the heart are drawn in alongside multi-national corporations. And Nolan doesn't stop before employing his signature brilliantly fashioned scenes from the cream-of-the-crop stuff of capers or intelligence thrillers, among which it is.