FILM OF THE WEEK 1
DiCaprio plays
This man can get inside your head
In the first of two spellbinding films out this week, Memento director Christopher Nolan creates a world of
dreams with a dazzling sci-fi thriller that has our critic on the edge of his seat – and glad to be alive
Philip
French
Inception
(149 mins, 15) Directed by Christopher
Nolan; starring Leonardo DiCaprio,
Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy,
Ken Watanabe, Marion Cotillard
Just over 100 years ago, in August 1909,
on his first visit to New York, Sigmund
Freud went to the cinema for the first
time, accompanied by his colleagues
CG Jung, AA Brill, Sándor Ferenczi
and Ernest Jones, his biographer.
Jones later recalled they saw “one of
the primitive films of those days with
plenty of wild chasing. Ferenczi in his
boyish way was very excited by it, but
Freud was only quietly amused.” Had
it been on in Manhattan at that time,
Christopher Nolan’s dazzling new
film Inception would have provided
all the wild chasing needed to excite
Ferenczi, while its obsession with
dreams and dreaming would have
brought a good deal more than quiet
amusement to Freud, who’d spent
the Atlantic crossing analysing his
companions’ dreams.
The anthropologist Hortense
Powdermaker disparagingly called
Hollywood “The Dream Factory” but,
from the beginning, the closeness
of dreaming to movie-going and the
ways films shape and are shaped by
our nocturnal inner journeys were
perceived early on. Back in 1970, more
than 30,000 people responded to a
Sunday newspaper questionnaire about
the films that most closely resembled
dreams, the top 15 ranging from Last
Year at Marienbad and 2001 to Belle de
jour and The Seventh Seal. Nolan’s film
is the most thoroughgoing to deal with
the subject. It centres on an American,
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio playing
a character not unlike his troubled cop
in Shutter Island), a top practitioner
of industrial espionage who, instead
of breaking into safes, infiltrates other
people’s dreams. People like him are
known as “extractors”, and they carry
devices called “totems” to remind
themselves whether they are conscious
or unconscious (Cobb’s is a small brass
spinning-top), and watch out for “the
kick”, the falling feeling that will wake
them up.
Cobb works with his cool assistant,
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), on
top-level missions for rich clients. But
because he’s suspected of killing his
wife (Marion Cotillard), Cobb cannot
return to America to see his children.
He has, in fact, left her isolated in
a distant dream limbo, which not
unnaturally has left him riddled with
guilt. When a Japanese financier
(Ken Watanabe) gives Cobb a special
assignment, it promises to be that last
job that all movie cracksmen take on,
the one that will enable him to break
free and change his life. The mission,
however, involves something more than
“extraction”. It calls for “inception”:
Nolan’s great skill is
his ability to combine
the cerebral and the
visceral, with a light
hand and a sharp wit
entering a dream and implanting a
new idea or impulse. The target of
the exercise is the business tycoon
Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir
to an industrial empire. He must be
persuaded to break up his dying father’s
vast conglomerate for the sake of global
peace. But this can only be done by
the dangerous process of penetrating
several levels of consciousness and
Cobb must take some fellow specialists
on the interior journey.
In seven films made over the past
decade, beginning with the brilliant
shoestring thriller Following made
in his native London, Nolan has
established himself as one of the most
accomplished movie talents at work
today. His great skill resides in his
ability to combine the cerebral and the
visceral, to weave together speculative
ideas with the conventions of popular
entertainment, using a lighter hand
and a sharper wit than the likes of the
Matrix moviemakers and without their
smug solemnity. Nolan is again pursuing
large notions about time, memory,
disorientation and manipulation, as he
did in Following, Memento, Insomnia
and his Batman films, as well as more
personal themes about the loss of kin
and the search for identity. In Inception
these preoccupations, all metaphors for
our everyday lives and experiences, are
happily anchored to elements from the
caper movie in its heist and confidence-
trick modes and from the action movie
(a major sequence at a frozen mountain
fastness is classic James Bond).
To achieve his aims, Cobb
travels to France to recruit a young
mathematician and mazemaker (Ellen
Page), who can create Escher-like
buildings in people’s dreamscapes.
She’s appropriately named Ariadne
after the king’s daughter who gave
Theseus the key to navigating the
minotaur’s labyrinth. In one of the
Leonardo
a professional
dream stealer
in Inception.
film’s spellbinding special-effects
sequences, she wanders round Paris
transforming the city as she goes. In
east Africa, Cobb signs up a brilliant
Asian chemist whose drugs can take
people ever deeper into dreams, and a
British agent (Tom Hardy) capable of
metamorphosing himself in the minds
of others. It’s a heady business that
reaches its climax when the dreams
of five people merge and conflict. For
the most part the picture manages
to be simultaneously gripping and
intellectually provocative as well as
curiously moving, though there’s
something more than a little self-
reflectively comic in Ariadne’s anxious
question: “Whose subconscious are we
going into actually?”
Nolan is superbly served by his
cinematographer (Wally Pfister) and
editor (Lee Smith), both of whom
have worked with him on several
films, and by Guy Hendrix Dyas, his
British production designer. The film
is the stuff that dreams are made on, a
collaborative work of great technical
skill and imaginative detail where
everyone is working to help the writer-
director realise a personal vision.
Like Memento, the most intellectually
demanding of Nolan’s previous films,
Inception demands and rewards our
total attention as well as our emotional
engagement. You’ll want to see it again
but not, I think, on the same day.