Somewhat Uninceptional

I liked INCEPTION, Christopher’s Nolan’s latest blockbuster and cinema-forum hot topic, although I liked it in a way that is very close to that ineffable distinction between what is a dream and what is a nightmare: more a matter of mood than of content. A rare 2.5 hour drama (no jokes!) through which I didn’t look at my watch once, I enjoyed the experience and scale of what was going on – especially because I saw this movie “properly” on the one ‘real’ IMAX in New York City. It felt good, it felt fun, it felt exciting. I'm just not sure why. Content-wise this film was far, far less than it could have and should have been.


I once dreamed about my grandmother playing chinese-checkers with a wet suit-clad reptile. Nolan apparently dreams about James Bond movies: mercenaries on skies, security guides with semis, tall buildings loaded with explosives. The dreamworld of INCEPTION is so heavily rooted to reality that it becomes indebted to reality in a way that isn’t entirely positive. Ultimately it’s an issue of mise-en-scène: Nolan doesn’t care about a dream’s bizarre facets, the concatenation of truths and fictions, the clang associations that populate our unconscious. In fact INCEPTION doesn’t quite deal with the unconscious at all. Rather it dives with abandon into something of a pre-conscious: the tip-of-the-tongue; the nearly-formed, just barely out-of-reach, abstruse landscape of creation.


“Dream” is the word that keeps popping up in the literally pedantic stretches of dialogue that connect moments of (truly spectacular) special FX and heart-pumping action. INCEPTION’s concept of “dream” is about the origin of ideas, a.k.a. inspiration. It’s not the “dream” of The Interpretation of Dreams: the puerile peregrination through fantasy. That’s an almost definitional difference we are dealing with. Unlike a Kaufman or Gondry or David Lynch movie, INCEPTION leaves the "personal" off the table – DiCaprio’s dream can be Ellen Page’s dream can be Benazir Bhutto’s dream can be yours or mine. It also leaves the personnel off the table -- there is nothing here in the way of a character or particularly convincing performance (baring, perhaps, the energetic Marion Cotillard). This isn't a movie about people dreaming, it's a movie about "dreams" disembodied, in a way, from humanity. INCEPTION's “Dream” is a creative breeding ground, call it limbo or what have you, right before the Realm-of-the-Idea. It isn’t a playground for our desires to run amuck, get into scuffles, act out, hide, play, create, fuck. In short, no latent content here: Nolan’s dreamscape is blithely un-Freudian, terrestrial, and literal.


And quite frankly, sort of prosaic. Nolan is too mainstream for INCEPTION to be great (but just mainstream enough to allow such a tricky movie to get greenlit .) I’m not talking ticket sales, I’m talking about personally. His sort of fascination is with reality and memory, truly epic stuff, but his sensibility is that of a clinical thinker. He’s Not Weird Enough. That’s what it boils down to. I think about a tremendous moment in ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND when Jim Carrey, running to find his rapidly-erasing lover in the streets of his memory, is startled by a sports utility vehicle that seemingly falls out of the sky. It’s a strange moment that isn’t “explained” in any traditional way – it’s just at this point in his eroding recollection the landscape is changing; cars are dropping from point A to B; fences are erected and destroyed; shit is fucked up. I love the weirdness, the violence, the disconnect. INCEPTION could never have a moment like this because the film feels such a compulsion to explain, to not be ludicrous, to not give into its watery and dreamy logic. For it wants real-world logic, even in dreams. And maybe that’s just the kind of movie Nolan wanted, which is fine. But for me, given my personal tastes, given my own relationship to dreams (both my own and the dreams of classic literature), this didn’t quite work.


But I don’t understand the complain that INCEPTION is “confusing”; I mean, quite seriously, that this film was not confusing enough by half. Confusing suggests in a sense “designed to confuse” but INCEPTION was apparently designed to make everything so perfectly plausible that it couldn’t help throwing “rules” in our faces. Sure they may be a lot of them, sure its complex, sure it’s massively over-determined, but its not confusing. I wish Nolan would let go of his boyscout fidelity to “sense,” but I’m just seeing more and more that he’s not that kind of filmmaker. Despite being the “baby” that he waited ten years to have the creative and literal capital to make, INCEPTION is a film that would have been better if it was made by somebody else. Nolan is a good action director but he has editing problems; the “multiple layers” of simultaneous events failed in a way the final scene of THE DARK KNIGHT or much of BATMAN BEGINS did. Things don’t quite mesh, which is problematic when the multiple worlds Nolan is trying to “layer” end up feeling like just one world that’s massively cluttered.


Still, if you take it on it’s own grounds; if you play by its own rules, there is a tightness and syllogism to INCEPTION that’s hard not to like. It’s easy to stitch a tightly-knit fabric when you control the loom: so can you get yourself out of any (narrative) trouble if you’re the one who writes the laws. We can appreciate the final product, but it can never be “great.” Or maybe just this one isn’t. In the end INCEPTION is something of a bassoon: an overwrought, ponderous, behemoth of an instrument, playing an elegant and elegiac song; probably not for everyone.