Just try to go to sleep

Rating: 6/10 (16 July 2010)

People love to talk about the relationship between cinema and dreams. As a slightly surreal artform in and of itself, directors and artists have always tweaked with the filmic space of perception to achieve dream or dream-like effects. The problem I typically find in almost all movies attempting to recreate dreams is that they do so in too literal a way, often drawing attention to the dream effect they are portraying. This becomes even more difficult to pull off in movies that question the line between dreams and reality (a much more obvious line than pop philosophy ever really acknowledges) pretty much have to point out the dream techniques of the production you are watching. This is Nolan's central dilemma, and one he doesn't really manage to transcend. As a visual invention in technical prestidigitation, this movie is successful, but it is too bogged down by exposition to really let its dream-scapes breathe.
Really, this movie is closer to The Matrix than Paprika, a Satoshi Kon animated movie I expected it to be closer to. A core group of technopirates get into people's dreams to steal information, but now they are a challenged by a corporate agent to actually plant an idea in the head of a target instead of steal the idea. This process is called inception. Now Nolan goes the correct route and centers the action around the head of the dream stalkers, Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Seems Cobb has some mental juju to work out that keeps "projecting" into the missions he undertakes (Nolan misses the point of Freudian "projection", but hits a cute pun on the very medium we are watching). So as these mercenaries of the subconscious get ready for their mission, it is complicated by the fact that their intrepid leader at any point can cause phantasmic chaos. Enter a few rules about dying and waking up, losing your mind and creating mental labyrinths, and you basically have the movie's own architecture for what ultimately, when it comes down to it, past all the rhetoric and screen wizardry, becomes a series of set-pieces.
Nolan creates a world where this technology exists, and sets the rules of the technology. He then adds the element that in a world where that technology exists, rich people like Cobb's target would have defenses set up. These defenses translate into literal nobody adversaries for whiz bang action. In order that death seem actually like a bad thing (beyond just waking up), he sets Limbo. Then the movie goes, losing track of what is essentially at the core of everything the audience cares about--Cobb's inception, and the working through the guilt he has. I guess ultimately Nolan didn't want to remake Shutter Island. I'm not sure DiCaprio really felt a huge difference between either role.
So we're not in legitimate dream world here. The characters are too aware, the dreamy twists on reality are pointed out and explained via direct real-world correlations, the subconscious is generally predictable and follows ineffectual actions from barely described motivations, and in order to get there Nolan has to cram way too much exposition into the first twenty minutes, instead of dwell on the central drama of the entire movie, Cobb and his wife. That's fine because then we're in Nolan's world, not dream world, and he can make any rules he wants. So he does, and you get... you know.... chase sequences, Siberian battles, explosions. If Nolan is expressing anything in his subconscious here, it's that he deeply regrets not having an opportunity yet to direct a James Bond movie.
However it's not all that bad. The story of Cobb, the creation of the labyrinths, the technical beauty of it all is engaging science fiction cinema. The only root problem is Nolan's asking of the somewhat clichÃ©d albeit age old question, "What is the difference between dreams and reality?" Because no filmmaker who brings up this question never answers that question definitively, audiences shouldn't expect for it to be here. However, Nolan does miss one definite thing about dreams that does not work in his scenario.
In Inception, Cobb and his wife live, and age, for years in a dream world of their own creation. Later, his wife cannot tell if them waking up came to another level of dream, or if they finally achieved reality. I would just point out the obvious: In dreams, you never go to sleep. You may wake up, but even in Inception, going to sleep within sleep requires an apparatus.
Problem solved.
--PolarisDiB