A Master Has Arrived

Rating: 9/10 (8 August 2010)

Warning – contains spoilers for Inception, Blade Runner, Following and Memento.
Nolan has done what we hope Tarantino will continue to do  evolve. Ten stars is Godfather, Casablanca, Chinatown. Nine is so very close for so young a director.
A Nolan fan since Following and Memento, I saw Inception and was amazed. I went back two more times. Whenever I went, the theater was full.
This movie has disappointments – projectile weapons demonstrating "obstacles" and creating "conflict" (does everyone read McKee and Field?), a score that could become as comical as Scorsese's lurid Shutter Island music, howling plot holes like Cobb telling Ariadne, "It's my subconscious. I have no control over it," which if true would make the movie collapse as quickly as a dreamscape.
If you fall willingly into the maelstrom, it's a good ride, Hollywood at its best. Nothing is on the nose except Ariadne the "student" allowing conceit dumps every ten minutes to keep us briefed on dreaming and the backstory of Mal. But the movie bears close watching and does not bore unless you tire of guns, car chases and ominous music.
It's a white guy's movie. The emotional depth of Mal and Ariadne are limited. Mal is an object of lost symbols and Ariadne learns too quickly to be human. Her gestures are awkward and she doesn't belong. In Following, Memento and Inception, a woman is lost to the protagonist, allowing the director to ignore them in any meaningful way. Ken Watanabe as Saito is a cartoon Japanese magnate, and Dileep Rao as Yusuf runs a stereotypic opium den straight out of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
But Inception is dense, and I love dense. The sound track has spectacular ADR effects –a man hitting a windshield during an early chase sounds like a large fish dropped from a thousand-story building. Comic relief is delicate and correct. A bit of rivalry between Arthur and Eames is allowed to show.
The question is, "Does Cobb return to the topmost level at the end?" It doesn't matter if his token falls over; that's Mal's tell. His "children's grandfather" (Michael Caine) tells him he "should return to reality." Why do people have symbolic names - Mal, Ariadne, Miles – if they're real? Cobb tells Ariadne she's dreaming because she can't remember traveling to Paris, a clue that persists with every edit. Cobb moves his team around the world without means. "We need to go to Mombasa." Osaka, Paris – a lot of Customs for a murderer. Could be editing, could be a dream. How does Saito buy an airline they only just figured out they needed? Ariadne picks up dream architecture quickly because Cobb learned it in sixty years of limbo. Mal ridicules Cobb's belief that he's "Still stealing secrets from billionaires and being chased around the world by corporate spies." This adds up to the Blade Runner riddle - is Deckard a replicant? Do his eyes glow red in the kitchen? Is Cobb dreaming still when he's reunited with his kids? Yes to both. Otherwise, Inception ends sappy. Nolan ends dark. In Following, the bad guy gets away after beating a woman to death with a hammer. In Memento, Guy Pearce may commit murder to revenge a living wife, or trick himself into killing someone for another reason. Somehow, DiCaprio reunited in suburbia doesn't fit that Weltanschauung.
In the suicide scene, Mal's arranged a disordered hotel room to stage murder by Cobb, giving him no choice but to die with her. If he stays behind, the cops will get him. When Cobb approaches the window, she's on the opposite side of the street. She rents a hotel room, messes everything up, then goes across the street to climb on a window ledge in a different building? When Cobb gestures for her to "come in," he uses an inward motion with both hands, which given her position, encourages her to come into the void between them and down to the street below. His subconscious has made her into a spiteful dangerous betrayer who shoots his partners and stabs Ariadne in the guts with a butcher knife. He is by body language asking her to kill herself.
Near the end of the credits before the Dolby logo scrolls by, Edith Piaf starts singing "Non, je ne regrette rien" to signal a kick. And if that isn't enough to convince you, at the very end, the low bass thrum that signals the kick itself is heard.
In the end, it's an intellectual puzzle with a supposed great love affair, but nothing goes on between Mal and Cobb that qualifies as emotion, much less love. "She was lovely," says Arthur. Then why does Cobb have an elevator full of regrets? All DiCaprio does is talk and fight. If Nolan had shown us Cobb and Mal in a single sloppy embrace with mussed up hair, and if the ice castle sequence hadn't been so deadly dull, I'd have gone a full 10. But it's close, real close. How close? Well, I'm going for number four this weekend.
I'm not going to find a sappy happy ending from level two, but the murderous Nolan universe with evil and victimized women, a universe where Cobb locks his wife's token in her childhood doll house to hide the truth, where he orchestrates her suicide, gestures for her to jump because he wants rid of her – and she sells Cobb out.
This won't be the sunny happy story of a man reclaiming a life with his idyllic children and their grandfather, but of a man who has planted a virus, a worm, a self-replicating lie in his mind and the mind of the viewer  that he is a guiltless victim of tragic circumstances.
But at heart, and by profession, he is a thief – a thief of love, of secrets, of life, of dreams, of time – a criminal.