INCEPTION

Rating: 5

Christopher Nolan spent eight years perfecting the script for INCEPTION, the first script of his that he’s directed since is stunning, time-bending debut, FOLLOWING. The result is a complex meditation on the interplay between the conscious mind and the layers below it, and the insidious tendency they have to pull the strings of perception on each other. For those wanting a dazzling, effects-laden event film with a city folding over itself, INCEPTION delivers without reservation. For those wanting an intellectual puzzle of the first order, with tantalizing clues and an ending that offers not so much closure, as a jumping off point, INCEPTION is a treasure.

The plot is set in an indeterminate near future, or perhaps an unsuspected present. In it, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) leads a crack team of dream invaders, for want of a better term, who have been hired by the fabulously wealthy and powerful energy tycoon Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea into the subconscious of Fisher (Cillian Murphy),the heir to a rival’s energy empire. The catch is that Cobb and his team steal information, planting an idea is trickier, if it can be done at all, with repercussions that can’t be anticipated. But with the fee promised by Saito of clearing Cobb of the charges that prevent him from returning to the United States and his two beloved children, Potts can‘t refuse.

The team includes a new member, Ariadne (Ellen Page), a callow college student of Cobb’s father-in-law (Michael Caine), the man who taught Cobb everything he knows. Ariadne will be the architect of the dream worlds, of the dreams within dreams, that Cobb is using to do the titular and putatively impossible inception within Fisher’s deep subconscious, so deep that he can’t help but believe it’s his own idea, and because of the nature of the procedure, find it impossible not to act upon. It is the interaction of Cobb and Ariadne which opens the cinematic world for the viewer, and upon which much depends. Cobb, the architect who can no longer trust his own subconscious demons to not invade a dream created for others, and Ariadne, learning her craft from the best and being mystified by Cobb’s mysterious inner conflicts. She goes so far as to link herself without permission to his own, private dreams and demanding answers to the disturbing things she finds there, including the recurring intrusion of Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose name is French for evil, and who has it in for Cobb. That Ariadne shares her name with the mythic Cretan princess who showed Theseus out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth is no accident. Nor, that the cue to warn the dreamers that their about to be woken up is a song sung by Edith Piaf, played by Cotillard in LA VIE EN ROSE. Nolan is working on as many symbolic levels here as his characters are in the land of Nod, and on a few others, archetypal in nature, as well.

Nolan is creating in film the same sort of dreamscape these interlopers devise, and a delightfully deft diversion it is. Ariadne is cautioned to leave details for the dreamer to fill in, the which to make the dream itself more real and more personal, in the same way that a smart filmmaker, will leave details for the audience to fill in from personal reference. But more, he is posing the far more troubling question of what is objectively real and what is not, both in the dreams and in reality. The dreamer projects his or her own expectations within the dream, and in reality as well. Humans, as a species, see what they expect and/or want to see. When expectations are subverted, chaos ensues, externalized in the dream by hostile background characters turning on the interloper, internalized with a loss psychological moorings that find their outlet in the violence that erupts within the dreamscapes.

The three dream states, as with the layers of subconscious, inform one another, though from the top down and in disturbingly literal ways. Time is stretched, becoming more relative that even Einstein might have imagined. A van falling off a bridge in the first dream, takes a few seconds there to hit the water, but oceans of time in the third level. The free fall causing those in the dream below to similarly ignore gravity, providing one of the showiest sequences in the film, but one that has the peculiar, provocative internal logic of a dream. In Nolan’s vision, though, it’s no less unsettling than the water in a glass tilting at an acute, impossible angle.

The effects, cutting-edge and as ingenious as the story itself, serve only to annotate the action, never overtake it. The sense of tension comes not so much from the pyrotechnics as from the relentless ticking of the clock, and from discovery of the new internal rules that come of having so many dreams within dreams, and in the way the invaders find to circumvent and to work with them. Then there’s that new rule, that death is not the worst consequence of a wrong move.

Skillful intercutting from one state to another, and a raggedly emotional performance from DiCaprio make time the one irrefutable, if malleable, reality, while the ongoing duel between waking and dreaming underscore the sense of brooding menace that originates in the darkest part of the id.

In INCEPTION, Nolan has spun an elegantly cerebral story that is primal, compelling, and as visually disconcerting as it is and completely captivating.