Downside Up: A Review of 'Inception'

Huddled together in a darkened auditorium, the communal experience of seeing a newly released film at the cinema is something akin to that of a shared dream, especially if that film contains the limitless worlds afforded by digital special effects and their attendant unshackling of aesthetics from indexical reality. James Cameron’s recent Avatar pulled the audience into the lush and bioluminescent world of Pandora through the device of the human protagonist effectively being put to sleep, his dreaming self let loose in new body into a strange world. The Matrix, ten years ago, pulled the same trick. Perhaps such dream-zones are the most pertinent space in which to explore the alienating same-but-different world of global hyperspace, in which our minds can alter our surroundings at will, our projections of ourselves are limited only by our imagination, but in which the rules and dangers are never fully explicated.

Christopher Nolan, director of puzzle-thrillers Memento and The Prestige, has taken this conceit in his latest film Inception and turned it into a device to cause as much havoc as possible. The Freudian diagnosis of dreams as evidentiary expressions of subconscious clutter is used as the basis for what would, if it were not for the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream madness of it all, be a pretty straightforward heist thriller. If our secrets are hidden within our subconscious, the logic of the film goes, why not create a world in which these secrets can be stolen by teams of “extractors”, skilled in entering the dreams of others, navigating the immune-system of mental mazes, and stealing the guarded secrets of the most powerful people on earth.

The frisson of describing a potential target as having a “militarised subconscious” is unfortunately undercut the further it becomes evident that Nolan’s conception of dream-theft is going to rely on a prevalence of automatic weaponry, and deploy massive explosions the same way other films do jump-cuts. It is fitting that all the psyches entered in the film are male, as the ensuing mental constructs are reliant on weaponised conflict and hulking, crashing machinery. Offering the suggestion that this is intentional, the only women in the film are either “architects” (a kind of dream interior decorator), air stewardesses, or demonic interstitial shades (the depiction of the last, admittedly, entertainingly playing on the ‘mad-woman-in-the-attic/basement’ trope).

The film is a two-hour long action sequence unfolding across various levels with different rules, goals, and characters on each, like playing several computer games at once. A genuine first, Inception may be edited together faster and be considerably louder than its own trailer; composer Hans Zimmer is a Wagnerian talent, but his free-associative, thunderingly loud, and literally non-stop contribution here is wearying. In Nolan’s previous film, The Dark Knight, chase and fight sequences proliferated to the point of ceaseless crescendo, but this was all in the service of a story about the terror of arbitrary action and the morally dubious deeds undertaken at times of frenzy. This, by contrast, is a world of rules and limitations which are repeatedly expressed to ensure the audience is aware of how the game is played: when the fact that death in a dream makes the dreamer wake-up is bluntly explained once again I realised how much I craved for the tension of a set-up like that in, say, Pontypool, in which the fascination with remarkable goings on stems from the necessity for the rules to be discovered through desperate inquiry.

Inception is remarkable at times in the skill with which it orchestrates the grandiose, often unique, and occasionally (but only occasionally) mind-bending action spectacle (a single-take fight in a rotating corridor is coordinated with – pardon the phrase – Kubrickian genius, if only the vehicular catalyst for it were not so lazy). The casting of Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are also particular successes, but it was a shame to see Ellen Page forced into the role of exposition-prompter. Continuing the conspicuous consumption of the near $200 million budget beyond the sets and effects, even the minor roles are filled by name actors (Pete Postlethwaite gets one line, Michael Caine’s role is in the trailer in its entirety, and it turns out that Lucas Haas is still working).

The film is similar in intellectual register to Tony Gilroy’s underrated spy thriller Duplicity, but where that film was unwilling to give the audience very much beyond the occasional frozen pizza joke, Inception wants to give the audience everything it can. It is certainly stunning, but there is a hollowness to the exercise. Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist Cobb and his guilt-ridden psychology are given pride of place, but this is at the expense of all else. Say what you will about stories that revolve around guilt-ridden protagonists pining for redemption and middle-aged men seeking reconciliation from their fathers, these elements are not fresh. Never mind that here they are less the subject of the drama than the subjectivity of them is the subject of the drama, but nonetheless their predominance is a disappointment.

Possibly the lack of surprises towards the third act is itself intended to be a surprise, but personally I would have enjoyed an increased tension between the heist players, or more shades to Ken Watanabe’s bankrolling corporate benefactor who inexplicably (in a logical, rather than narratological, sense) accompanies the team into the mind of their target. Duplicity had similarly impermeable characters, but their heavily guarded personalities were the subject of a bravely medium-oriented enquiry into trust and the inability to ever know what another person is thinking. Despite all the time spent within mindscapes, there is little of note to the way anyone in Inception thinks: the characters are ciphers, and reduced to gun-toting grenade-throwers before too long.

Nolan is a very giften director, and he and his team are impeccable at their craft, although the editing of Lee Smith remains too scissorhands for my liking. But in their eagerness to create a well-ordered world of rules, levels and action they have lost sight of the charm, freedom, and bizarreness that are the lasting pleasures of both good dreams and Blockbuster cinema.

Nobody Politic: A Review of ‘Body of Lies’

Like the son I never really had an opinion one way or the other about: the script by William Monahan for Body of Lies depicts yet another post-Oedipal, woman-free zone of masculine friendships and apathy.

Shortly before departing the house for what turned out to be a private viewing of Body of Lies (evidently even Peckhamplex’s “bargain Tuesdays” have failed to beat the credit crunch, or indeed the lacklustre reviews), I saw the opening segment of the December 1st Daily Show: in it, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed the recent terrorist attacks in India, and concluded that the perpetrators were “motherfucking motherfuckers”. This alternative news show, normally quite willing to dig deeper and more acutely than major US news networks, responded emotionally and crudely to the tragedy. Ridley Scott, director of this new but by no means fresh geopolitical thriller, fails to engage either emotionally or intellectually with the subject, and concludes much the same as these pseudo-journalists, only without the slight hint of grace required to illicit laughs in light of a massacre.

It is difficult to in the film down, it spins away in so many lacklustre directions. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative in Iraq who is frequently mis-handled by Russell Crowe’s overweight strategist back in Langley. Between them they manage to balls up seemingly every operation they come into contact with, preferably utilising missile-laden helicopters. It turns out that, while this sort of thing is permissible in the war zone around Baghdad, it doesn’t fly so well in Amman, where DiCaprio’s Ferris initiates a hesitant yet doomed friendship with the self styled king of Jordanian intel. As the script later spells out, trust is the overriding factor in cross-cultural co-operation involving Arab nations and organisations, and Uncle Sam seems inherently unable to show all his cards.

With the casual detail and atmospherics that come as standard with a Scott production (from either brother, for that matter), it is at first a pleasure to watch an Iraq depicted as a real place, rather than the dramatic borderland of DePalma’s Redacted, or the bomb-stricken dysfunctional state viewed nightly on BBC news. However, the more destinations the film visits, the more they each feel the same, as though every Middle Eastern country had the same roads, architecture, bakeries, and slums. For all the absurdity of James Bond’s latest sojourn around the globe, at least every place he visited felt alive with its own customs, weather, people, and even introductory font. The people moving in front of this background don’t liven it up much either: protagonist Ferris orchestrates his existence as if he is writing the screenplay of the film himself, while Crowe’s Analyst Ed Hoffman serves little purpose than to provide a counter-image of America: the packaged sushi-eating bad father to DiCaprio’s do-gooding cultural nomad (although, if he loves the Middle East so much and has worked there so long, why does he make such rookie mistakes as offering a new inamoratas his hand to shake while being watched by so many purist locals?).

Amongst the anonymous score by Marc Streitenfeld and unremarkable Pietro Scalia editing, one of the few pleasures to be had is Mark Strong’s performance as Jordanian intelligence chief Hani. Walking a fine line between several cliché characterisations, all of them a million miles away from each other, he lends dramatic weight and intellectual curiosity (if not believability) to all scenes in which the character features. William Monahan’s script fails to provide the same taste and refinement for the other characters, while the narrative he crafts follows a similar sons-impressing-their-father’s trajectory as his work on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed, but is tellingly free from the bracingly unique statements of personality and individual identity that made those so sly and rewarding.

The film is watchable enough, and were it a movie of the week imported to this country from HBO, it would be little more than an uninteresting diversion. However, with the calibre of much of the talent, and the indication from many of those involved from previous projects that they have an interest and sensitivity towards a more compelling and progressive depiction of geopolitics than one finds in the latest Bruckheimer production, Body of Lies is a sore and unwarranted disappointment.