While I realize that seeing Lost Highway and Inception in one weekend paves the way for an unfair comparison, it’s still amusing to me that Nolan’s film, so ostensibly concerned with the depths and wonders of the human subconsicous, is yet so bereft of imagination.
At its best, Nolan’s film comes off as little more than a fascinating remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors upgraded to Business Class. Instead of Freddy Krueger, there’s Leonardo DiCaprio who once again plays someone tortured and sleezy-looking, with that trademark feathery, police-issue moustache-goatee combo that only serves to make his head look more enormous. (Recall for a moment that this is the same actor who starred in Catch Me if You Can, with hardly a sulk in sight.) As a subconscious spy, DiCaprio infiltrates the minds of powerful, if thinly plotted men, but in spite of his apparent status as The Dream Master, he can’t seem to devise a more elaborate metaphor for his own subconscious than a multi-story building with a spooky elevator (don’t go into that basement!).
If Orson Welles’s description of Citizen Kane’s ending as “dime-store Freud” is accurate, then this is the cinematic equivalent of a free Dianetics consultation in the Times Square subway station. Nolan’s conception of dream-logic is so painfully rote and circumscribed, so hilariously corny, that it literally – in one of the dialogue’s many expository howlers – comes down to a father-son complex. And a terribly acted one, to boot: Pete Postlethwaite gets to nap through his few scenes in the film as a moribund tycoon set to leave an empire to his son, played by the usually fascinating Cillian Murphy. For god’s sake, someone please save this actor from Christopher Nolan—here he’s totally wasted as an utter pipsqueak whom you always expect will start kicking ass but never does. Joseph Gordon Levitt is also not given an actual character, but he’s at least fun to watch. The movie really should have been about him or at least about him taking over from DiCaprio in a To Live and Die in L.A. kind of way.
This raises an idea that I am usually resistant to in movies, but one that can, in a pinch, generate some semblance of complexity: the plot-twist. Strangely, while you’d think this would be the ideal sort of film for such a device, there is none. Instead Nolan strives to ensure that his film is never less than totally clear about what’s going on, which dream you’re in and when, and which arbitrary dream rule that he made up applies in this dream but not the previous one. The characters explain everything—except why any of them cares enough to do this, or how this technology is used in the world at large beyond excessively complicated corporate takeovers. With these trivialities swept aside, the plan comes off really well—so well that I was waiting for something to go wrong so the movie would start.
It never does, but there is some twistiness of another kind: a bit of skiing, a car chase, some punching and shooting. And I realize this has been mentioned before, but Christopher Nolan still hasn’t figured out how to direct an action sequence, has he? JGL’s dancing-on-the-ceiling scene is pretty good, being the sort of lo-tech action sequence that Nolan prides himself on, but in virtually every scene, the montage is crude: shots don’t cut together, the action is largely built from shaky and surprisingly long takes, and spatial relations make no sense when they ought to and too much when they ought not (“That’s a motherfucking paradox, bitch!”—actually, it isn’t). Even the awesome sense of scale hinted at in some of the digital animation – the folding city, for example – fails to gain any coherence in wider shots, giving the whole film the strangely claustrophobic aspect of being trapped in someone’s beige, boring dream about luxury hotels.
Which is precisely what this movie is: a desperate, confining brain-upload from Hollywood’s sputtering dream-factory. The idea of mind-control – of planting thoughts in people’s brains, or “inception” – is an old saw in the public discourse about movies and their effects on us. But as much as media conglommerates wish that they could perfect this science and implant it in our slumbering brains via blockbuster movies, video games, or lumpy hybrids of the two, the nearest thing they can hope to achieve is not inception, but distraction. Keep your eyes on the spinning top, and think about whether it matters whether your own life is real or not. Please try not to notice that the last two-and-a-half hours of executive acrobatics was all for the benefit of an incomprehensibly powerful and ruthless (but sometimes friendly!) CEO of something that wants to monopolize everything. Don’t worry about capitalism; just enjoy its dreams.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Digital Projection
28 Jul 2010 12:02 AM | Comments (6)
Hear hear. I didn’t watch Lost Highway the same weekend as Inception but all I could think about was how much more interesting this would have been if in some alternate universe (my dreams?) David Lynch had been handed this script and $10000000000 to do whatever he wanted. Alas.
I admit that I was engrossed throughout, though almost purely on a “WTF is happening” level. Afterwards, I relented and came to the conclusion that none of this makes any sense even according to Nolan’s own arbitrary rules (and, significantly, unlike a film like_Last Year at Marienbad_ or Lynch’s films, this is a movie about the chaos of our dreams and memories that nonsensically forces a conscious order onto them). And really, there is not point to the film aside from figuring out its own internal logic, so once that fails, there is absolutely no reason to care. It’s actually kind of amazing how thuddingly literal a vision this is of the “subconcious” and how little it adds centuries of discourse on the nature of dreams. Can the fanboys explain to me why this is #3 on IMDB? Seriously?
Though, that JGL spinning ceiling fight was pretty great.
I enjoyed Inception, despite agreeing with pretty much everything you say, but I think your point about it being a “lumpy hybrid” of a movie and a video game is particularly dead on. It seems like today’s commercial auteurs are especially prone to confusing complication with complexity (to borrow a formula from David’s Lost Highway review) and making the characters/audience’s attempt to understand “the laws of the world” substitute too much for plot, character development, or moment-to-moment interest. (This is often what’s most fun about a sophisticated video game Ñ the gradual learning process Ñ but it involves a willingness to devote hours of your life, which to people on the outside of the experience looks like a pointless waste of time and energy.) So if you fundamentally just don’t care about the laws of the world, you won’t care about the movie either. I’m thinking also of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, which was like watching a bunch of fanboys figure out the rules to a new role-playing game.
I’m sure there must be commercial directors out there who can successfully craft “video game”-style movies, but Nolan and Shyamalan aren’t it.
Steven Lisberger?
A.O. Scott tried to make the “Nolan’s dreams are boring” argument as well, and he ended up sounding like he should have just left the theater and watched a copy of “The Cell” instead. Now, the same argument is being made with David Lynch as the control group.
Yes, the dreams in “Inception” are simple. By keeping the dreams simple, Nolan was able to insert decidedly abnormal events without completely losing the audience. Would the film be as watchable if, while on their way to fulfilling their objective, the characters kept getting accosted by their subconscious wants and fears? Instead, Nolan keeps us focused on the one manifestation of the subconscious that is integral to the story, Marion Cotillard’s character.
In the end, the characters of “Inception” are not trying to ruminate on the nature of dreams or the subconscious. They have discovered this amazing new technology (a technology whose creation is thankfully left ambiguous), and while other characters (Michael Caine, for example) may use the technology for the purposes suggested in the comments above, DiCaprio and Gordon-Levitt have exploited it and turned it into a business. Nobody said that the characters in “Inception” were good guys.
Word, Leo.
Here is a nice piece by Kirk Hamilton that compares Inception (unfavorably) to video game tutorials. It’s quite a thought-provoking piece, actually—one that begs a wider discussion about the connections and translations between these various media as they become increasingly equal (and integrated) partners in moving image culture.
Tim
28 July 2010
12:33 AM