A movie worth writing about

INCEPTION. This has been a long time coming, and I would like to say the time has been spent mulling over my thoughts. But, well, that would be a lie. Every time I open my Google Reader I see that it says there are two posts waiting for me to read and I feel guilty. So while waiting for Thirsty Thursday this week, I'll put some thoughts to proverbial paper. Keyboard I guess.

Having seen the movie (trailers) twice, I can say that those who say one has to see it more than once to "understand it" are either being what the kids call a "hater" or exaggerating. I got it for the most part the first time but there are certainly layers of meaning that come out after seeing it a second and -- what I hope will soon be -- third time. The first screening was mainly consumed with following the twists of plot and it was not until revisiting the move that I was able to appreciate the full extent of the scope of Christopher Nolan's filmmaking. Watching Memento in between, I found myself focusing on how well he had transitioned from a small-scale to a grand-scale director.

Inception has that complex storytelling packed full of nuance, metaphor, and layers of meaning found in movies generally relegated to small budgets and art-house theaters. But partly as a result of his commercially successful Batman franchise, Nolan has been given a studio budget and produces his movies in a way that reminds me of classic epics from the studio age where a director could fill the screen with his vision. From beginning to end, Inception is an immersive movie where the level of production value fills the screen with his vision. This is a movie that should properly be experienced on a large screen. In Memento we follow one character and use creative filmmaking to tell an individual story with the focus at all times on Leonard (Guy Pearce). For Inception the lead actor might be Leonardo DiCaprio, but party due to its ensemble cast, the real main focus is the world and the dreams. The characters are each more important for how they serve as our conduit into the understanding of Nolan's exploration of the concept of reality. More on why DiCaprio's Cobb is the most-developed character will have to wait.

I also got the sense of a more classic style of filmmaking in the actors chosen. DiCaprio might be a movie star but one known for using his post-Titanic career to position himself as a serious actor instead of a matinee idol. Start culling through the rest of the cast and you pull people known for providing strong performances in movies, not as btox-office draws. I get the sense that in making this movie Nolan pretty much said "I want a Joseph Gordon-Levitt-type actor" or an "Ellen Page-esque ingenue" and instead of trying to find someone to fit the bill, he got those actors. I have a running idea in my head that I go back to of who would be my dream ensemble if I were casting a movie (a topic I think worth making a post about, now that I think of it) and there's a sense I get that he did the same thing. And cast them.

Alright those are general ideas I can write about for those who are living under a rock and therefore not seen this movie. Now begins...

SPOILER ALERT

Now that is out of the way, the question is what I think the movie is about. As I discussed with you before, I do not think that the top -- his totem -- is going to fall. Although I have avoided reading analysis before writing this I did see one twitter post that made me think. Whoever it was wrote that it didn't matter if it fell or not because he was happy -- although it was written somewhat more eloquently. My reasoning for why it does not fall are somewhat related to that. The question of whether the whole movie is a dream is not something I will probably ever be able to tell for sure, although as I think of it again, I start to consider how much every character seems to act how he would expect -- specifically how certain he is of Ellen Page's reaction. Anyhow, that is for another post. The main idea I felt after coming out was that reality did not matter to him anymore and so his creation of his own world where he could be content is what mattered to him and so that's what he chose to do. Watching it more I think I'll be able to look more at the idea of how Nolan is exploring denial and how the idea of happiness itself is not an authentic but instead manufactured concept. Again, that might be for later.

The other part of the post that I couldn't really say before the spoiler cutoff is how much I admired the pacing of the movie. The movie holds suspense for roughly the last hour by cutting those different dreams together that are so different not just in atmosphere but also in the type of suspense created. From the idea of a falling van and a race against time and

an action-movie fight, we get a run of the different ways a movie can use its tools to keep an audience enthralled. Again, filmmaking on a grand scale. Nolan really shows in this movie how his ability as a small director and large-scale director can both be used at the same time.

Also, I think I might need to see the movie again. Soon. But there's my start to the discussion.

All Things Incepted

If you're anything like me, you can't get enough Inception information, analysis, and theorizing. So I thought I'd compile some of the better pieces on the film that I've found lately in the ol' series of tubes.

(And be forewarned, a lot of these contain substantial SPOILERS, so click the links at your own peril.)

• For a couple weeks leading up to I-Day, CHUD's Devin Faraci wrote a series of articles dealing with various aspects of the film, ranging from the rotating-hotel fight sequence to Hans Zimmer's score to a video showing us what Inception would have been like had it starred Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero.

• Devin also wrote an article analyzing the film's meaning as he saw it, both at the immediate level (i.e., "how much of it was a dream?") and at a more "meta" level of what Nolan was trying to say with this film. A very interesting read.

• At Cinematical, Peter Hall has a piece that first examines six of the interpretations of the film already floating around (keep in mind, the piece was published only three days after Inception's release—what a movie!), and then points out five plot holes that he perceived. (Most of these "plot holes" didn't bother me at all when I watched it, because there seemed to me to be perfectly intuitive explanations—not necessarily the only or the correct explanations, mind you—for them. But that's probably a subject for another post.)

• For a bit of an inside scoop, New York magazine has an interview with Dileep Rao, who played Yusuf the dream chemist. Luckily, the interviewer doesn't waste time with boring stuff about how he got attached to the film, how he enjoyed making it, what he thought of the other actors, etc., but instead goes straight for what we're really interested in: how does stuff like limbo and kicks and different dream-levels work? Answers to your nitpickiest questions, straight from the horse's mouth (or at least as close to the horse as we're ever likely to get). (However, Rao, like me the first time I watched it, is under the impression that the third dream-level, the mountaintop hospital, is Fischer's dream; but as one "Viewdrix" convincingly explains in the first comment, the dreamer in that level is actually Eames. I guess no one's a 100% reliable source when it comes to Inception explanations.)

• Finally, if you haven't already spent enough time on Inception—and I spent five hours watching it last weekend—then /Film has a two-hour-or-so-long podcast in which David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Adam Quigley discuss their impressions and interpretations, and about halfway through are joined by the New York Press's (in)famous critic Armond White, whose, shall we say, less than positive review has already created enough waves in filmreviewdom for Roger Ebert to address the controversy. (Though White's obviously a very intelligent and learned critic, I have a fundamental, visceral inability to take seriously someone who not only thought that Gentlemen Broncos was better than Inglourious Basterds, but called it "the 2001 of 2009." Though, on the other hand, he's right that Crank 2 was better than Avatar, so who knows what to think.)

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

INCEPTION

I know that lately this blog has been neglected to the point that we should worry about hearing from Blog Protective Services, but it seems like it's been a while since I saw a film that really motivated me to throw my thoughts out into the electronic ether. Inception (trailers) is that film.

— YOU MUSTN'T BE AFRAID TO SPOIL A LITTLE BIGGER, DARLING. —

The first and foremost thing I have to say about Inception is: You see things you've never seen before. I don't mean that hyperbolically, but literally (unless you happen to have the imagination of a Fellini or an Arthur C. Clarke). The kind of sheer imagination on display in Inception is a rare and precious thing, especially in today's Hollywood and especially given the amount of resources usually necessary to pull it off convincingly. The city of Paris folding over onto itself; a freight train plowing down the middle of a busy city street; people fighting in a rotating hotel hallway; crumbling skyscrapers falling into the sea like a glacier. Even for these purely visual aspects of the film, to think that they all came from one imagination gives me even greater respect for Nolan—who both conceived of them as writer and executed them as director—that I had before.

In addition to the breathtaking visuals, the story itself is a marvel. For almost the entire running time—two and a half hours that flew by as quickly the second time seeing it as the first—it seemed that at least every ten minutes some new element entered the story that made me stop and think, "That's really cool," or "That really interesting," or "I can't wait to see where this will lead." Starting in the first fifteen minutes with using a dream within a dream to compound the subject's vulnerability, on through the use of totems, the dream-projections' violent reaction to dream invasion (and the extent to which anti-invasion training can take that, as seen once the team enters Fischer's subconscious), the differences in the perception of time between waking and dreaming (and its exponential multiplication as more dream-layers become involved), the necessity of a "kick" sensation to wake the dreamers, the revelation that the Mal who keeps appearing in dreams isn't an outside invader like the team but Cobb's own projection of his dead wife, Cobb's responsibility for her death and how that was done—Inception's story was so fascinating, so engaging, and so well and intricately constructed that it never gave my interest a chance to flag.

Just how well constructed this story is, just how much thought and care Nolan put into it over the decade or so he was working on it, is made particularly evident in the film's centerpiece, the team's invasion of Fischer's subconscious. Not only do they use three dream-layers to plant the idea deeply enough without his noticing, but each layer serves a particular purpose: the first (the rainy city) plays off the resentment Fischer feels toward his father; the second (the hotel) establishes distrust between Fischer and Browning; the third (the mountaintop hospital) creates the positive, emotional basis for the idea, the "catharsis." Eventually, all three layers are active simultaneously and affecting one another, seen most dramatically in the first layer's effects on the second, from the tumble-cycle hallway effect as the van flips over to the weightlessness created when Yusuf drives it off the bridge.

As we've already discussed, the various layers have distinct roles not only in the team's plan, but also in the narrative and drama of the film itself. In the first dream-layer, the van's slow (from the other layers' perspectives) fall toward the river below serves as the ticking clock against which everything else must race; in the second, Arthur must use both brawn to fight off subconscious security and brain to figure out how to create the kick necessary to awaken his sleeping teammates in a zero-gravity environment; the third is a classic action sequence with guns, explosions, and an army of faceless bad guys; in the fourth, limbo, the drama and suspense are emotional rather than action-based, as Cobb must finally confront and overcome the destructive pain and guilt he feels about Mal. These four layers are simultaneously interwoven in a tour de force of stunningly effective storytelling and editing, a cinematic Swiss watch.

Of course, all these scenarios would be insufficient without interesting characters and talented actors, and Inception has both. DiCaprio's Dom Cobb joins the ranks of protagonists haunted by their past familiar from Nolan's filmography: Guy Pearce in Memento, Al Pacino in Insomnia, Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, and, the exemple par excellence, Christian Bale in the Batman franchise. Like them, Cobb is essentially a loner but is forced by necessity into uneasy alliances of convenience with others, imbuing him with an intriguing tension. The other members of the team are much more peripheral, but that doesn't mean they're one-dimensional or without color: the professional Arthur's longstanding but often tense working relationship with Cobb; Eames and Arthur's barbed exchanges; Ariadne (I see what you did there, Nolan!) as the simultaneously eager but cautious outsider, a role both giving an opportunity for explanatory exposition for the audience's sake and providing a fresh pair of eyes to perceive the damage and danger caused by Cobb's obsession with Mal; Saito acting both distantly first as target then as suspicious employer, and closely as an active member of the team. In addition to these, we get Batman alums Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy, as well as too-brief appearances by Pete Postlethwaite, Lukas Haas, and Tom Berenger (who's been AWOL from marquees too long, if I might be permitted a little Platoon reference). Though the amount of screen time some of them get is limited, they all come across as real, vibrant characters.

Inception was a joy to experience, and my hope is that its success will make it easier for similarly ambitious and visionary stories to get produced. I've already heard it described as the kind of film—like The Matrix over ten years ago, and Star Wars and the early Spielberg films twenty years before that—that will send kids to film school in the years to come, and I think the fact that it's so imaginative that it doesn't just put its creator's imagination on display, but also sparks its audience's imagination, makes that prediction a pretty likely one. We'll be fortunate if budding filmmakers find inspiration in Inception, with its creative vision, intelligence, thrilling action and suspence, moving drama, technical mastery, intriguing characters, and vast ambition. Inception is the cinematic total package.

P.S. — For this post's title, I was also considering "Beyond Your Wildest Dreams" and "Immaculate 'Inception,'" but I think you'll admit they're a bit over the top; and, after all, you can never go wrong with the potent combination of Hammett, Houston, and Bogie.