Get out of my dream!

The extravagant praise heaped upon Inception is comprehensible if we assume the critics, like characters in this $200 million blockbuster, are trapped inside somebody else's dream -- Christopher Nolan's. As trippy mind-benders go, there is lots better, not the least of which is Nolan's own inception as a director, the backwards-running noir tale of a man who's lost his short-term memory, Memento. True, Inception itself, lacking the lean-mean economy of that early Nolan effort, nonetheless does maintain a clean, elegant look, and sports an admirable cast in which seasoned pros like Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, and Leonardo DiCaprio are backed up by talented and fresh-faced newcomers like Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt. What's not to like? Nothing; it's just that there's a little less here than meets the eye. It's a lot of eye-candy -- and talk, lots and lots of energetic expository talk. Kudos to the whole cast for delivering their endless speeches explaining what's going on with a sense of urgency. That's what it means to be a pro. But listening to them and watching a lot of explosions and somewhat pointless scene-shifting, though always entertaining enough, because intelligence and taste are at work governing things, become wearying after a while. You watch for certain effects - Paris folding in on itself, men in tight suits floating gravity-free in an elevator shaft -- but not enough strings them together.

This is a popular movie that lays claim to being "intelligent," "challenging," a mind-bender. So are the Matrix films. This means fun to talk about, but doesn't necessarily mean "good." In fact Inception hinges on some things called "ideas" (it never becomes quite clear exactly what they specifically are)-- "abstracting," that is, stealing them, and inserting new ones in people's minds. In this variation, people can share dreams, enter other people's, and shift things around. Think of it as a game, I guess; it's hard to think of it as anything else. Nothing has any logical or scientific basis. That's not the point. It's cute, in a way, like Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues" -- “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours” -- except that some sinister things can happen when these people are involved.

Inception asks us to consider certain points about dreams. Time is condensed in dreams. This is true: events in a dream that seem to cover hours or days all happen in a few minutes before waking, in actual dreams. You can spend too much time dreaming. (Some of us knew that.) Cobb spends too much time thinking about Marion Cotillard ("Mal), his wife, who invades his subconscious when he's trying to do his dream "work."

Entering somebody else's mind through his dreams is best done by a team who dream, more or less, the same dreams. (This humorless film, too excited with itself to see very far, misses all the ironies and invasion-of-privacy issues in that point.) Doing the changing requires "architecture" which may be done by a young Sundance girl star, whose skill is judged by how fast she can draw or solve a maze.

Also needed is a "chemist," to drug sleepers so they don't wake up before the dream-work has been done, and this individual, if non-white, can later become the team driver.

Ideas, as mentioned, can be removed or added to someone's mind via entering their dream. Cobb (DiCaprio), the corporate dream-thief, who's in trouble and wants to retire, is prevailed on by Ken Watanabe to take on a cliché "last job" involving a new challenge never before tried: to insert a new idea in somebody (more missed ironies). The usual work is called "abstraction." This new thing is called "inception." A misnomer: "inception" means "beginning." Better to say "insertion."

This weakness of title, and perhaps concept, signals a certain vagueness in the plot and the writing. This is not alone in being a movie that's more about its beautifully realized scenes than about the concepts behind them, as well as more about the process of dreaming than about what happens in the waking world. The trouble is that $200 million means technology, and technology means CGI and explosions, and that leads to an action movie, and what's "intelligent" about that? Just as mainstream moviegoers confuse expensive with well-made, they tend to lose the distinction between "intelligent" and high concept. This a movie of high concepts scrunched into even higher concepts in a Russian dolls sequence that leads almost nowhere. And you know what? I don't know about you, but my dreams aren't action movie sequences. But all the dreams here are. It's stunningly unimaginative. But it reflects the mindset of today's Hollywood.

As in Calderón's saying, Life is a dream and a dream of a dream, when Cobb's project is under way to insert an idea in the mind of the heir, Robert Fischer Jr. (Murphy) we get a dream of a dream of a dream. There are also different levels of dream or unconsciousness, where the dreamer's depth of sleep is crucial, but I must admit the movie lost me there. There is much uncertainty in my mind whether what is going on in Inception is complex thinking, or just tricky plotting. Of course it gets hard to tell after a while what's the waking and what's the dream or how many dreams are inside other dreams, but really, who cares? The trippy game of moving between dream and reality is better done with a bit less exploding, as in Naked Lunch, eXistnZ, and other films, most of which are by David Lynch. The recurrent image of Inception is somebody's hand placing a plastic explosive device on a wall and seeing it go off a few seconds later; flames; people rushing away; new scene. The inimitable Walter Chaw puts it this way: "In lieu of depth, Inception offers complexity; it's the philosophical/existential equivalent of a Rubik's Cube." There is stuff about father issues and romantic obsession, but again quoting Chaw, Nolan has taken his anguished concept of the lone self in Momento and fed it "into the grinder of multiple explosions and a script so literal it'd be insulting if the viewer weren't distracted from it trying to keep up with its labyrinthine arbitrariness." The result is yet another summer disappointment, albeit a glittering one.

Not much new about stealing and planting ideas as a preoccupation in the corporate world, except this movie makes the very odd and, again, literal assumption that an "idea" is a "thing." It's not; it's as evanescent as a dream. The conversation piece of backyard barbecues, Inception may seem a brilliant film. It is not. It's diaphanous-light content is weighted uncomfortably down by the albatross of its technology.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.