A Palimpsest of Dreamscapes

Rating: 8/10 (27 July 2010)

Inception is a heist film of a different breed and wrapping your head around the details takes some effort, considering writer/producer/director Christopher Nolan has interwoven 5 different tiers of reality (one wakened, and four dreamscapes arranged like concentric circles). It takes effort but it's not impossible, because the framework that motivates the dreamscapes and the action therein acts as a guide – a safety rope to keep you tethered to comprehension. Otherwise, you're lost in a daze of dizzying visuals and intercut realities, each with their own unique measure of time.
The framework is this: Saito (Ken Watanabe) is the CEO of a Japanese power company that wants to corner the market. Impeding this is a larger British company owned by the dying magnate Maurice Fisher (Pete Postlethwaite) and his son and heir the to the empire Robert Fisher (Cillian Murphy). Saito needs to convince Fisher Jr. to break up the empire (thus allowing Saito's corporation to regain its control over the world market) and hires Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team of subconscious commandos to infiltrate Fisher Jr.'s mind in order to impregnate him with that very notion. This is inception – planting the seed of an idea in someone's head but making it appear self-inspired. Thus the brouhaha of the dreams within dreams.
Nolan does provide us with some helpful signposts to keep us oriented, however, and the tiers can be deduced by their unique locations: a plane, a van, a hotel, a mountain bunker, and a crumbling city. And it is an extraordinary ride on the whole. However, despite the vast amounts of creativity Nolan puts into weaving this tale, I was disappointed by the creativity the characters employ within the dreamscapes. Early in the film, Cobb explains to newbie Ariadne (Ellen Page) that dreams aren't held to the same physical laws of existential reality. Yet three of the four tiers in Fisher's mind are nearly identical to Newtonian physics. Why don't the characters, in facing Fisher Jr.'s mental defenses, adapt by taking advantage of the freedom in defying the properties of the natural world? Why don't the characters pull up trees from the roots or grow extra arms? Certainly each dreamscape adheres to its own internal properties but I would think a little room for play would have ramped up the visual and narrative intensity even further. That quibble being said, Inception is a great ride of a film, and it's rare that a movie forces the viewer to think to this degree for this long. It's a wonderful mental exercise and I look forward to my next screening.