In one of his earliest interviews about the movie, Christopher Nolan described 'Inception' as "a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind." This one statement contained enough enigma and exhilaration to set our hearts and minds, punch-drunk after 'The Dark Knight', pulsating.
Comments like "why does June have to come between May and July?" and "everyone else making movies-go home. Do a bank job or something. Nolan just outran us all before we even got in the race", seen on cinema websites were indicative of the roiling, restive hysteria that preceded this flick. The lock-stock-and-barrel cast too did nothing to bring peace. On the contrary, it sent several ignoramuses (me included) scurrying, to look up actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard, online. (I swear, for 2 years after she won the Oscar, I did not know anything about her beyond her name. Until, that is, Inception came along.)
And then, there were the trailers. Rhapsodies of sight and sound. Filled with impossible, unforgettable, divinely poised and symmetrical visuals, set to tectonic, overwhelming, Hans Zimmer pieces. The trailers that sustained me through 10 long months, as I OD-ed on them.
The most definitive scene-one that figuratively sums up the entire movie- is the one where Ariadne, the tyro architect, grasping the order of the dream world under Cobb's tutelage, creates a pair of humongous mirrored doors underneath a boulevard of successive archways in Paris. Each door is hinged on an arch adjacent to the other. So when the doors hinge themselves shut, their mirrored faces come to a close parallel to each other, with Cobb and Ariadne in between them. The effect is instantaneous: reflection upon reflection, image upon image stretching away to infinity.
Nolan has always been fascinated by perception: be it the warped perceptions, refracted through the prisms of diaries and journals and legerdemain, that formed the basis of an implacable one-upmanship in 'The Prestige'; or the fragmented perception of the anterograde amnesiac completed with the help of tattoos in 'Memento' (is it just me who senses an echo of 'Memento's tattoos in 'Inception's totems?); or the fear-addled monstrous perceptions in 'Batman Begins'; and, finally, the sleep-deprived, guilt-ridden, mist-cloaked perception of the ageing detective in 'Insomnia'.
Right at the start, Nolan, the artist, offers us a palette of scenes that play into each other. The first of these follows a young Cobb (Dicaprio) and his right-hand man Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) as they try to extract a piece of treasured information from the vaults of a wealthy, powerful Jap, Saito (Watanabe). They are, however, caught in the very act of stealing by Saito and a comely, regal, gun-toting lady. What's more, she uses it with impunity, shooting Arthur through a knee, while interrogating Cobb. On the verge of getting shot in the other knee, Arthur is shot dead by Cobb himself. From there on begins a breathless chase through the labyrinth of Saito's royal residence. Cobb is desparate to evade capture and death, especially at the hands of the female, who, in turn, is equally inclined to reward him with both. Abruptly, we see Arthur waking up from a deep sleep in a totally different setting. (First rule of Nolan's dream world: if killed in a dream, you simply wake up. But there are other kinks to this seemingly straightforward rule, as seen later). Working with a practiced mixture of urgency and cool, he instructs the other person in the room to give Cobb a 'kick'. We see one shot of Cobb slumbering on a chair placed atop a raised wooden platform overlooking a tub full of water. Before we grasp the goings-on fully, the scene again cuts to the chase in Jap bungalow: Cobb is trying his best to shake off his pursuers, firing and dodging bullets, smashing and overturning furniture, until he arrives at a clearing. With equal dexterity, the scene once again shifts to Cobb getting his 'kick'. These scenes are now intercut with those of Arthur attending to a prone Saito who seems to be on the verge of waking up from a deep sleep. The 'kick', as we come to know later, involves giving the sleeping subject a violent shock, often physical, so that he well and truly wakes up. Cobb's chair is literally kicked (with him on it) into the tub in a stunningly orchestrated slow-motion sequence.
Meanwhile, Cobb standing perfectly still in the clearing, watches as jets of water cascade down the walls through the ceiling. A split-second later, he wakes up drenched, to find Arthur and Saito already awake. A confrontation ensues between the three of them, and the interrogation continues, albeit with the sides reversed now: Saito is at the receiving end. At their wit's end, Cobb and Arthur realise the only way to extract the information from Saito is to force it out from him. In their despair, there is a brief struggle at the end of which Saito finds himself on the floor, his cheek pressed to an unusual carpet. Seeing which, Saito coolly deduces that he must be in a dream and that too, in someone else's dream.
The scene cuts again to one set inside a speeding train. Arthur, as usual, is the first one to wake up and immediately prepares to give the other 'sleepyheads' a 'kick'. This time it's gentler (an opera song over headphones that echoes eerily inside the room with the unusual carpet), but the circumstances are more pressing. The audience, I suspect, will never tire of Nolan's sublime gift for springing surprises and epiphanies, his flagrant pulling-out-the-rug-from-under-one's-feet machinations.
It is at that precise instant that we realise the source of the dream to be inside the speeding express train in Japan, where the threesome (Cobb, Arthur and their architect, Nash) are dreaming furiously, preying upon Saito's (who is asleep on a nearby seat) subconscious.
By giving us a dream-within-a-dream and by working backwards/outwards, he makes us, the audience really go through the paces, be with him on every step, explore every facet and nuance exactly as he wants us to and yet, the complete picture eludes us. Until the final instant of revelation. By ensuring that we, his audience, are in such a state of thrall, in such an equilibrium between possibilities, he forces us to question everything before us and inside us. By obliterating the distinction between dreams and reality, he makes us question the truth of the reality that we perceive.
To move on with the story, we find out that Cobb is an extractor, who, using a futuristic dream-sharing technology, can penetrate a target's subconscious via dreams and extract secrets from it. Saito, who had resisted an earlier salvo by Cobb, now gets hold of his architect Nash, and forces Cobb and Arthur to do his bidding. Saito heads the world's second largest telecom empire. Quite naturally, he hopes to topple the numero uno telecom giant, the young Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Yet Saito seeks to act in the most insidious way possible, and this is where Cobb and Arthur come in. What they need to do is the exact reverse of their usual job i.e. instead of stealing ideas or secrets, they have to plant an idea, or rather a germ of one into Fischer's mind. An idea that would grow, like a parasite, seeking subsistence from the alienation of Robert Fischer from his dying father, Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite), who had built the empire brick by brick, ultimately propelling Fischer Jr. to dissolve his inherited empire.
Saito plays a tempting game of quid pro quo with Cobb, offering him a return to his home and his children. We learn that Cobb has been in exile after having lost his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), unable to return home facing charges for her murder. Cobb grasps at this opportunity with the hope of a dying man. He assembles a team comprising of a greenhorn architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), a thief-cum-impersonator Eames (Tom Hardy) and a sort of a psychopharmacologist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who specialises in powerful sedatives necessary to maintain sedation during episodes of complex, multi-level dreaming.
The rest of the the movie follows this motley crowd of dream rangers as they prey upon the subconscious of the unaware, guileless Fischer. Along the way they have to contend with dangers of the dreamscapes, both expected and unexpected. The most fascinating concept we are introduced to here is that the passage of time in a dream vis-a-vis that in the real world. Since brain activity is heightened in a dream state, reasons Nolan, the passage of time relative to activity is slowed down. This increase in the time period is as much a part of the dream's verisimilitude as eveything else in it. In simple words, once inside a dream you have more time on your hand than you have in reality.
He further extends this concept to a dream within a dream, and another dream within the second dream, going upto four successive levels of dreaming. For instance, a time period of a few seconds in reality, may translate into a few hours at the first level of dreaming, a few days at the second level and probably a few years at the fourth level. This concept forms the basis for one of the most innovative and impressively-handled montages seen on film: action scenes occuring at four different tiers of dreams, all intercut and enmeshed in each other. The relativity of time (indicated by the most effective and justified instance of slow-motion), the effects of atmosphere, emotional states and physics of one dream level upon the other(s) (especially of gravity), the dangers of dying inside a dream while under sedation....... these have never before been experienced on film by most of us. Even as we watch them on screen, we literally rub our eyes in disbelief.
In addition to all this, thay have to deal with Cobb's wife, Mal, or rather her living memory. One of the dangers of dream sharing, as they realise all too well, is exposing oneself to others' subconscious minds with all their darkness and spite. (A very similar aspect had been dealt with more extensively in Tarsem Singh's seminal 'The Cell'. Here, Nolan refrains from going to deep and dark for the audience's comfort). Cobb's longing for his wife is so profound, it pervades his conscious and subconscious mind, rending it with guilt and remorse. Hence, Mal's projection (human creations of the subconscious, as called in the film) often appears as a kind of nemesis that Cobb cannot control, for the simple reason that he does not want to control it. He wants to be punished by it, so that he can unburden some of his guilt.
Technically, the film is non-pareil. A film about dreamscapes should, by definition, look and feel infinite. But, by relying more on real locations, astounding set-design (Guy Hendrix Dyas) and some epoch-making photography (Wally Pfister), than special effects, Nolan shows us the infinite power of bravura technique. Even the special effects used have a realistic basis: for instance, in the scene where Cobb and Ariadne rise from the sea and walk along a shoreline of crumbling buildings, the whole landscape was created basing the special effects upon actual photographs and footage of crumbling buildings.
Or the by-now legendary action sequence between Arthur and several henchmen under distorted gravity and the sequence that follows. Nothing in it was special effects: the whole lobby was, in fact, a 100 feet long corridor piece rotated through a complete 360 degrees by means of clamps, driven by 2 enormous motors. Gordon-Levitt was banged around for weeks inside the corridor before the final shot was canned.
Or the fact that the series of exponential explosions that occur when Cobb and Ariadne are sitting at a roadside bistro, was again using special effects based on actual of explosions. For the actual footage, pressurised nitrogen was used to trigger the explosions which were shot and later touched up by the special effects team, to give us the incredible final shot. "Add a little truth to the lie and it makes the whole thing seem truthful", as Alfred Bester once wrote.
Grouches, finding nothing else, may quibble about the lack of a single outstanding performance, especially from this movie, coming, as it is, after Heath Ledger's iconic Joker. But the fact is, it is a heist movie with an ensemble cast, with one of the most novel, complex plotlines in recent times. Within these parameters the mammoth cast works superbly well.
Leonardo Dicaprio plays the man lost in fighting his inner demons (while holding on to his sense of duty) yet again. A true Nolan hero. Along with 'Shutter Island', it makes a pair of grieving-widower roles for him this year. In fact, he almost completely effaces himself from the movie, so withdrawn is he.
Marion Cotillard looks so hauntingly, achingly beautiful, we can partly feel Cobb's grief and contrition, over losing such a woman. Nolan's version of a femme fatale.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt bears an uncanny resemblance to Heath Ledger, having the same slit-like eyes and high cheekbones as the late actor. He is pitch-perfect as the impossibly suave (hair, waistcoat, tie firmly in place even after a literally gravity-defying sequence), always in control Arthur. He is the perfect foil to Dicaprio's wild-eyed, haunted Cobb. His verbal jousting with the dandy, yet rugged, Eames (played with crisp, droll English humour by Tom Hardy) provides most of the laughs.
Ellen Page, as the rookie architect who gradually discovers the new, exciting, dangerous, infinite world, perfectly mirrors the audience response of awe, wonderment, exhilaration and panic.
Ken Watanabe is shrewd and manipulative enough.
Cillian Murphy is too good an actor to look out of depth in a role that is a far cry from his usual ones. He is aptly confused, tremulous, paranoid and shattered. To see him at the receiving end for no fault of his is quite a surprise, though.
The acting legends, Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite, are always welcome, even if only for 2- scene roles.
For a film about dreams, and that uses dream imagery liberally, 'Inception' stays outstandingly sharp, both in image quality and in narrative structure. Nolan shows consummate control over his writing and direction. For the dream sequences, the camera stays equally focussed, sharp and objective. The DoP eschews any fancy lighting or camera movement or any effort to be surrealistic. The result is a series of images that baffle in their continuity, confound in their juxtaposition and disorientate in their clarity. Surely as mind-bending, if not more, as several other dream-drenched movies.
Blessed with a $160 million budget, and a story so homogenous and organic, it could only be a long-cherished dream (10 years, in fact), 'Inception' is a triumphant paragon of personal film-making on an epic scale. The fact that its near-universal critical acclaim and (hopefully!) blockbuster status are its twin rewards, is typically Nolan in its symmetry.
