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Leonardo DiCaprio caught between dreams and reality in Inception |
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Dom Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt
(Arthur), Marion Cotillard (Mal Cobb), Ellen Page (Ariadne), Tom Hardy (Eames),
Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusof), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer), Tom
Berenger (Peter Browning), Pete Postlethwaite (Maurice Fischer), Michael Caine
(Professor Stephen Miles), Lukas Haas (Nash), Tallulah Riley (Disguise woman)
What is reality? It’s a question that for many of us never
comes up. But in the artificial and exciting world of film, it’s a legitimate
question. These worlds we watch unspooling before us on the cinema screen, so
large, so real, so exciting. Could we get lost in them? And how much do the
films we love echo the dreams that fill our nights, the movies we create in our
mind to keep our brain active during those hours of complete physical
inactivity? And what happens when the world of imagination and possibility
becomes more compelling, more comfortable – and perhaps more real – to us than
the actual flesh-and-blood world around us? These are ideas tackled in Inception: the blockbuster with a brain.
Set in some unspecified point in the not-too-distant future,
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are
“extractors”, shady corporate espionage experts who use experimental military
technology to enter shared dream states with their targets. While in their
dreams, they have complete access to their subconscious mind, where secrets can
be extracted. A wanted man in the States, Cobb is forced to ply his trade
despite his yearning to return home to his children. After a job goes wrong,
their would-be target Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires the pair to take on a far more
challenging role: rather than extract an idea he wants them to plant one – a
technique called “inception” – into the mind of a business rival (Cillian
Murphy) to get him to dismantle his father’s empire. To do the job, Cobb needs
a new team, including dream “architect” Ariadne (Ellen Page), dream identity
forger Eames (Tom Hardy) and dream compound chemist Yusof (Dileep Rao) – and
needs to try and control his own dangerous subconscious version of his late
wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) who is determined to destroy his missions.
Just a plot summary should give an idea of the twisty-turny
world of imagination and ideas that Christopher Nolan mixes in with big budget
thrills and excitements, in the most original sci-fi/philosophy film marriage
since The Matrix. Of course it helps
when you have the clout of having directed a hugely successful comic book
series, but Nolan was brave enough to trust that an audience for this sort of
action-adventure caper wanted to have their brains stretched as far as their
nerves. So he creates a dizzying and challenging piece of escapism that plays
around with the audience’s perceptions and understanding of the nature of
dreams.
In the world of dreams, the film is a fabulous tight-rope-walk
of dazzling concepts. Here everything is possible, with Nolan throwing at us
worlds from film fantasy: intricate Samurai houses, brawling third-world
streets, luxurious hotels, Bond-style winter bases and entire cities that
literally fold, bend and reinvent themselves around the film’s dreamers, worlds
that defy conventional rules of physics and time. This world is presented with
genuine visual panache at every point, Nolan’s mastery of the language of film
leading to a sensational series of slight-of-hand tricks and compelling set-pieces,
all the while making you question which events are real and which are dreams or
even dreams within dreams. In these worlds, the characters have the ability to
literally shape a world to meet their needs, and the dangerous attraction of
these worlds – even if they are not real – is the dark temptation that hangs
over every frame.
Because it’s those ideas beneath the action that give the
film depth as well as excitement, that ability to ask questions and openly
invite the audience to begin theorising themselves to fill in any blanks.
Within the world of Inception,
characters can create dream states within dreams, to share one person’s dream
while simultaneously all being inside the dream of someone else. These multiple
levels are cleverly established as being as much of a risk for the characters
in getting confused as they are for the audience, with the characters carrying
personal “totems” to help them judge if what they are seeing is reality or not.
This is made all the more difficult by the establishment that your subconscious
will manifest people to populate the dream worlds – and these will turn on
invaders they detect in the dream.
All of this tunnels down into the deep limbo of our
subconscious – and also introduces as a concept Nolan’s fascination with time.
In dreams, time moves at a different pace, and this differential becomes all
the greater as you descend down levels in dreams within dreams. A few minutes
can become an hour in a dream and become almost a day in the dream within it –
and years within the dreams beyond that. This is brilliantly demonstrated by
Nolan in the film’s dazzling central sequence as the film intercuts between
three timelines in three different dreams – each impacting the other.
It’s another masterful touch – the impact of actions on
dreamers’ bodies in the level above can be felt in their world. A slap to the
face in the real world can send someone in the dream flying across a room. A bucketful
of water turns into a tidal wave in the dream. The dreamer falling in the world
above removes gravity in their dream (giving Joseph Gordon-Levitt a cult fight
scene in a gravity free world that sees him gracefully leaping from floor to
ceiling to wall). The visuals are extraordinary, but the intriguing logic of
the inter-relation between reality and the dreams – and the way dreams struggle
to explain external effects – lend all the more credence to the mixing of
reality.
But then, as Nolan suggests, isn’t that film after all? In
dreams we move from location to location and struggle to remember the journey
in between. We find ourselves doing tasks and not knowing how we started.
Chases, faulty logic, sudden reversals and changes – these are the rules of
film, it’s editing slicing out the boring bits and focusing on the reality. We
are dropped into the middle of Cobb’s story and only slowly find the backstory,
a gun filled chase through an African city is almost indistinguishable from
similar sequences in the dreams. The final sequence of the film is a
purposefully cut series of images that are very true to the rules of film, but
feel alarmingly close to the rules of dream (unsettling us about whether what
we see at the end is truth or dream, a debate that continues today). It makes
for fascinating stuff, as well as a commentary on film itself.
Nolan’s film is gloriously entertaining, even if in its
haste at points it does fail to explain how certain events and concepts truly
work – but doesn’t really matter so compelling is the journey. The cast,
enjoying the chance to mix action hijinks with genuine characters and dialogue
are very strong, with DiCaprio anchoring the film wonderfully as the
conflicted, lonely, defensive and daring Cobb. Hardy made a name for himself in
a cheekily flirtatious performance, which sparks wonderfully with
Gordon-Levitt’s more po-faced Arthur. Page creates a character both naïve and
at times almost gratingly intrusive. Cotillard makes a difficult balance look
easy playing a character part real and part dream figure. Watanabe is archly
dry as the investor. There isn’t a weak link in there.
It may at times move too fast and not always make itself
completely clear. It might be a bit too long in places and take a little too
long to make its point – but it’s ambitious, challenging, intriguing film-making
that rewards repeated viewing. Not least with its cryptic ending in which we are forced to ask how much of what we have seen is real and whether - like Cobb perhaps? - we should even care at all if the end result is so positive. With the fascinating world of dreams – and the
rules there that we encounter – it gives us a firm grounding for the its
meditation of the dark attraction of fantasy, embodied by the genial wish
fulfilment of the movies where adventure lies around each corner and the heroes
triumph.