Had a conversation about Inception with a friend of mine recently via facebook and I think some good points were made on both sides. In case you care to read a fair bit:
Me: Either of you guys see Inception? Got around to it earlier today and I gotta say I loved it. I don't remember being wowed by a movie in the same way since I saw The Matrix when I was a wee lad. It's rare that I see a movie and immediately want to watch it again when it cuts to black but I could have definitely sat through this again. There's so much cool stuff going on visually and while the whole premise runs the risk of being ridiculous and gimicky I think it's too much fun and too much of a joy visually that it manages to avoid getting bogged down by some of its more obvious potential flaws. It's a darn cool interpretation of a heist film and a pretty sublime action flick. Plus it's a huge relief to see DiCaprio in a role similar to his from 'Shutter Island' but in a film far less overwrought and yawn-inducing than that clunker. Thank god this summer has produced one good movie. Thoughts?
friend: I saw Inception last sunday, and feel mixed. I had a great time actually watching it, but it began to sour on me as soon as I left the theater. It inspired a lot of thoughts, both positive and negative about the movie and about Nolan's career in general, that I hadn't been able to consider until I saw Inception.
I think part of the problem was that, following all that endless exposition regarding what can and can't happen in dreams, Nolan was ultimately just writing the rules to install regular action movie standards, so that our heroes face real death, must adventure to various striking locales, and face anonymous henchmen at every turn. It's interesting that you mention the Matrix, which also used the alternate reality device to permit otherwise implausible action sequences and special effects in our own recognizable world. But the Matrix, to me, felt so connected to the concerns of its time and also mixed a really smart cocktail of its influences that ultimately made the film's rules feel like more than just excuses for cool fight scenes. Inception is way more insular, and its expository rule-book feels precisely like that set of excuses that the Matrix avoided but that Nolan makes to allow for silly scenes of extreme-sport shoot-outs, death within dreams, and the like.
I've noticed that every Nolan film, sans the Batman series, ends on a moment of self-awareness. In Memento, it's Leonard Shelby's final line, "Now, where were we?", a question that seems rhetorical but actually signals the audience's long-awaited inclusion into the truth of Shelby's condition, and thus the narrative as a whole, following a fragmented sequences of intentional confusion. In The Prestige, Michael Caine's mentor character (essentially reprised in Inception) reiterates the structure behind a professional magic trick to remind viewers that, if they had been attentive enough, they could have spotted the twist ending well before it its ultimate revelation by the magician/director. Inception follows suit, further revealing Nolan's take on the film director as a con-man, a liar, who withholds and discloses information until his manipulation of the audience is complete. This is incredibly, bewilderingly cynical to me, and so it is no wonder that Nolan's protagonists (Shelby, Cobb, Alfred Borden of the Prestige) are all self-deceiving obsessives who will gladly forgo their deepest convictions to maintain a gratifying charade. Which I think ultimately means that Nolan is pretty out of touch with our own real emotional nature even as his screenplays make their claims over the human condition.
That said, I still had a great time watching it, and I loved the whole cast. I think they did an excellent job bringing weight to all the tension. The movie sucked me in, which is exactly what, to me, Nolan is good at. Being the con-man, the dreamer, getting me absorbed into something so that only after its over (and I've "woken up", so to speak) do I feel my doubts. The ending scene, right before the cut to black, is proof of that. Dimwitted viewers will scour this scene for meaning and turn it into message-board fodder in the hopes of increasing their understanding of Nolan's convoluted world. But that's missing the point. It's simply one of the film's exciting moments, when we of the audience get to acknowledge the instinctual thrills of Nolan's deception, even if we disapprove. I think it's also a self-aware moment, saying very blatantly, This film was a dream, get up and go back to reality.
And I agree that the visuals were just absolutely striking. Old Ken Watanabe was pretty haunting ("Come back and let's be young men together") and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's whole zero-gravity fight was just so much fun to watch. On a level of tried-and-true craftsmanship in an era of clunky CGI, it begs a question that I haven't had the pleasure of asking since possibly Terminator 2 made the action genre look real: "How did they do that?!", which is a thrill that I doubt I'll ever consider myself above. As far as summer moviegoing goes, it was definitely worth my money.
me:
A lot of valid points there. My reaction too was a gut one, a visceral response based upon that awe that both you and I already mentioned. That "how'd they do that?!" wonder is something I'm finding increasingly rare these days. Rarer still is the implementation of those moments in such a way that I only asked myself that question once the film ended - before that it had absorbed me too much to take the time to speculate. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling this some triumphant masterpiece. It's an action movie, a heist flick, a somnambulant Italian Job. And while I think there may be a bit more to the film's world than an series of excuses for cool action sequences, I would probably still have really like this movie even if things were that simple: The shootouts and fight scenes were just that mesmerizing and fun to watch. Good action sequences are so hard to pull off, especially in today's cinematic climate where over the top CGI has come to be confused with well done and interesting combat. I think it's safe to say these were by far the best since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's lush, near balletic bamboo forest sword duel.
Maybe praising this movie so much for that alone is being narrow minded but I do think there was more to it. The acting was all spot on for the most part. I was surprised that Ellen Paige was pretty good, Leo redeemed himself from that aforementioned travesty that was Shutter Island, and Michael Cain, even when his inclusion is token and largely pointless like it was here, is always fun to watch. That's to say nothing of Marion Cotillard, whose menacing, almost operatic femme fatale performance was the film's best.
I have to wonder if Nolan see's the director either as a con man or as a magician. I think there's a difference. Inception, and Momento as well, have this surface level trick that sounds like it would make for an endlessly confusing movie but neither are. They both make complete sense. I found Inception pretty effortless to follow. I think Nolan acknowledges that the potential for confusion is there - "Wait, so whose subconscious are we going into?" asks Ellen Page at one point - but he somehow seems to make it make sense in the world of his films (speaking of which, I really appreciated that this movie was a piece of speculative fiction, not sci-fi. Just because we have the technology to enter dreams doesn't mean we need flying cars and laser guns and I'm so pleased that Nolan realized that). To me, that line and several other moments indicates that he isn't pretending that he's not playing a game, fabricating things, playing with the audience in a way that builds expectations, breaks them, surprises them with bells, whistles, finales that leave you wondering. Like any good magician, that is. I don't see in Nolan's film some cynical attempt to baffle the viewer until a final "gotchya!" moment. I think his motives are more pure. Like I said above, I'm not much of a Nolan fan but I think I see his sleight of hand tricks, his manipulations, as more of a magic trick that is Nolan's way of reveling in what he thinks cinema can do. To me, accusing Nolan of cynical manipulation would be like accusing the guy who pulls the rabbit out of a hat and cuts his assistant in half with a saw of the same: sure, both are out to "get" the audience, to elicit that big gasp, but they're also out there to make you feel awestruck, to give you a sense of wonder in the same way movies did when you were a kid. Like I said, Inception struck me in a way that I haven't felt since I saw The Matrix opening night on the big screen. To me, that's a hugely redeeming quality. It's gotta be worth something, in any case.
me, again:
Speaking of the Matrix though, I will grant that Inception did feel more insular, less connected in any real way to our world, less a product of our zeitgeist. There was an whisper of something - Wattanabe insists that the inception must be a success to prevent Fischer's firm from gaining "total energy dominance" - that seems like the potential for a more clear cut eco-friendly, anti-corporatist, "look at the dangers and depredations of big energy" kinda message was there. Or it coulda just been corporate intrigue, one big energy mogul trying to stop another from becoming even bigger in the same of self preservation. There wasn't much more than a whiff of either. Maybe Nolan had no interest in being political which shouldn't necessarily be a criticism but yeah, in this case, the stakes maybe could have been higher. Why, for example, am I really rooting for these guys? I don't know much about them, their motives (for the most part), or the stakes of failure other than no pay day for most of the team, no reunion for Leo - and that's a lot of weight on DiCaprio's shoulders since the only reason we therefore truly want the mission to succeed is for Cobb to get his life back. A dangerous move on Nolan's part, that, and since you mentioned it I do wish there had been a bit more there, some kind of genuine relevance to our current situation.
