“Christopher Nolan’s directing is based on the theory that BLADE RUNNER is the greatest film ever made. “
Inception (2010) written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Its a heist movie. You can’t forget that. Its not science fiction or an art film, its not even really the idea movie that it wants to be. Its a heist, a team of specially skilled pros being put together to do an impossible job, with all the resources in the world behind them but no time to do it in. The core of this movie seems to be that Nolan felt like making a heist movie and devised a script around that rather than he felt like making a film about these ideas and landed on the heist structure. Its clearly a thinking genre piece but its genre first, and all the decisions born within the film attest to that. Thats probably Inception’s greatest strength is that it when it succeeds, (which I’d say is pretty much every aspect of the film that doesn’t involve the protagonist and then about 70% of his scenes succeed as well) it does so because its aware of the needs of genre. Which is where Blade Runner comes in.
Blade Runner is a perfect example of a genre film that transcends itself specifically because it never betrays that center. As in depth and complex a film like Blade Runner can be – or The Thing or The Killer – its achievements are in the depth they add to a genre with innovation rather than their deconstruction or distance from it. Inception’s points and twists are actually built on the expectations of the heist movie – how many people thought that Ken Watanabe was only there to fuck them over at a key moment? The protagonist Cobb says its his last job, pine over his lost wife, misses his kids, is slipping a little (usually in these movies its because of age, here its basically his sanity). Cobb’s story is classic heist lead 101, with a little of the specific Thief/Manhunter “oh god my wife and kids are everything” flavor for good measure. The film is stocked with a great ensemble cast all given almost nothing to do outside of sell the audience on their jobs. At least Nolan didn’t give them all hacky eccentricities (like Mos Def being afraid of dogs in the Italian Job). Many have called this Nolan’s Bond film, and many of the best Bond films are simply a variation the heist with a more prominent leading man. The pre-story job is clearly Bond, especially the last-second betrayal and destructive escape.
The thing about Inception is how counterintuitive it is. How instead of things getting more insane and complex as the film goes on, things actually simplify. Scale changes – it has to. But the one big criticism that you can level against Inception, that the huge scale and ability to raw on anything is undermined by the unimaginative dream worlds (japanese old-style mansion, riot-laden 3rd world city, inverted Paris, endless rainy LA, Goldeneye snow level, high-class hotel, drowned and decaying NYC taken wholesale from A.I.), its actually a feature of the plot rather than a failing. Namely, that the deeper they go the more simple it becomes, and the narrative jumps of dream-logic become self-fixing the deeper they get. And the other one – that the stakes change drastically because a character says so at a convenient moment – well, that didn’t bug me because Nolan has been known to pull that shit. Also, there is the very real problem of stakes in the second act of an action movie. There are so many ways to mess it up so handwaving is as good as any. This isn’t the kind of movie where “this shit just got real” works as dialog.
Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt are both cast against type, with JGL as the unfuckwithable no-nonsense trigger man and Hardy as the all charm con artist and forger. Ken Watanabe actually holds down the rest of his team at the key moment instead of selling them out, becoming a bit of a moral center for a film that spends a lot of its time wanting one. It spends a lot of time aching for a real villain too, and the situation continually getting worse covers this up for most of the film. But Marion Cottilard’s Moll is so flat that its an aspect of her character, and the move that Cobb uses against her in the film’s final moments. Heists need villains, and there is a problem with Inception, because there is none. Or I guess that Cobb is his own nemesis at the end, maybe. If you’re being generous.
Well, Nolan finally learned how, and it turns out thats not the only thing he was missing. Its about damn time considering he’s got two Batman movies under his belt. There does seem to be a bit of an urge to reclaim John Woo from the post-Matrix-cg wastoids too, especially in the way Joseph Gordon Levitt dances through his fight choreography, the way slow motion scatters water across people’s faces. JGL’s Arthur is a John Woo heroic bloodshed character. He’s the loyal partner and lateral thinking warhorse. The scary technician Danny Lee to Dicaprio’s emotional Chow Yun Fat. He’s the in-case-shit guy who’s character arc consists entirely of two lines of dialog, but carries more than his share of the film’s goodwill.
It seems a lot more aware of, or at least in tune with, the cyberpunk that The Matrix paid lip service to. Characters hacking into a fictional space where they understand the rules and know the tricks but is out of their control – thats not the language of dreams its the language of consensual hallucination. Inception isn’t a movie about dreams. Not in the way films traditionally treat dreams anyway – DePalma, Lynch, Fellini, Bunuel – none of their tools are used here. But the thing is, they’re not needed. Nolan doesn’t care about dreams. Inception is about dreams the way that F for Fake is about magic. What it says and what its doing are two completely different things. I’m not interested in what it says. Inception is a movie that pretends towards being nothing but a movie, and all of the best moments in the film are things that only work as filmed moments. Walls of water destroying Saito’s dream mansion as Cobb pauses waiting to wake up, cut immediately into ultra-slo-mo of him falling into a tub. You don’t even have to go into the fights or the setpieces, the film lives or dies on that moment alone, and its one of the more gorgeous things I’ve ever seen on a screen.
The Kubrickian comparisons don’t exactly work, maybe not at all. Nolan’s not interrogating the human condition with his films, he’s more about the making of the films themselves. Nolan’s other films, even at their best, are collections of images inside a series of puzzles. But… they have their basis. In two ways specifically – one, Nolan references Kubrick more than once ( 2001 is here, bodies floating to slow symphonies; A.I.‘s crashing water on abandoned office buildings), and finds himself in the must-show-everything school of filmmaking (see also pre-digital Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, other guys); and two, that Nolan actually finds the narrative brevity (or maybe directness?) that Kubrick personified. Nolan is world-building and puzzle boxing, but his films maintain a narrative clarity, especially Inception. Every scene is exactly as long as it needs to be, and serves only to hammer its point home. Well most of them, the lingering and repeating nature of the Cobb/Moll storyline fuck it up somewhat by its very nature. Even then, Nolan has made a puzzle here where there is no puzzle, which is something to be admired. Nesting and intercutting between “levels” isn’t a puzzle, not in the way that Memento and The Prestige are. There isn’t something to figure out, there are only things for the characters to figure out. Which, as the characters continually say, is their job. The inception in the film is essentially forcing the subject to come to an emotional decision on their own through leading scenarios. So the target is corrupted and forced to act against himself. Saito goes from dangerous appendage to essential member of the team. Cobb goes from on the brink of emotional collapse, of allowing his guilt to destroy him. Moll goes from being the most dangerous threat to a hollow symbol that defeats itself. Limbo goes from being an endless mental purgatory to an escape hatch. The, somewhat obvious, move to repeat certain key phrases and images force you to complete the idea of the last shot of the film, even though what you see tells you otherwise. There is another point: that the embedded second story of the film – the Ben Marko is the second operative, Deckard is a replicant thread – is that Cobb is being hacked by Saito, drilling phrases into him to force him out of his recursion loop. To embed the idea that unless he changes something he’s going to become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.
To simplify: the lone man of Nolan’s film is its weak link, and even he gets to escape the idea that defined him with a little coaxing. But he still has to make his way out on his own.
(a certain man – part five)
- Sean Witzke, July 2010
Going to see this tomorrow, but this is the first review to make me excited rather than interested. “About dreams in the way F For Fake is about magic”?! I want to see it *NOW*!
This is an excellent essay, it pretty much puts into words many my feelings about the movie. I love the descriptions of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character as an “unfuckwithable no-nonsense trigger man” and as the “loyal partner and lateral thinking warhorse”. I’d probably go so far as to say he makes the movie for me, more than Dicaprio’s tortured hero.
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This is the first review that actually sums up EXACTLY what I was thinking. Thanks for actually dissecting this in a meaningful way, and not just worshiping at the alter of Nolan blindly.