Inception - Movie

I was sold on seeing the movie “Inception” because of a short clip. In it, Leonardo DiCaprio (“Cobb”) speaks about entering dreams in a soft monotone to actress Ellen Page (“Ariadne”) as the street and buildings around their café table explode, break up and flutter away like loose paper. (Fabulous!) The movie’s premise, a corporate super-spy (DiCaprio) who has perfected the art of entering dreams to steal ideas, is hired to pull off the “heist” of a lifetime by a mysterious Asian businessman (Ken Watanabe) who operates out of a spectacularly lit ballroom. This “heist” has a twist. Cobb is supposed to implant an idea destructive to maintaining the corporate enemy’s monopoly, after mining the unsolved father/son angst for usable reasoning. This is apparently much more difficult than stealing the secret plans to say, a car engine. The reward, strangely like that of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, is a promised trip “home,” which for Cobb is more difficult than for some because he’s had some bad press there, and also, has been dreaming so long he's not sure where his lifetime is anymore. We are also never sure, like with the wizard, how his powerful client can make good on his promise, but Cobb takes a “leap of faith,” or maybe desperation, and trusts him with his muddled mind, and the lives of his team. He agrees to take the job. Enter--- defenses, memory bits, or (maybe unconscious rage?) disguised as Cobb’s dead wife “Mal” (Marion Cotillard) in a glam dress to sabotage his mission every which way. I excitedly picked up the references that “mal” means “bad” in French, and in mythology, Ariadne was the goddess of weaving, or the maze. Unfortunately I lost more of the references than I got, but even lovely Leo seems to have developed a line down the center of his forehead trying to wrap his mind around the content of the movie. Even so, what psychological type like me doesn’t love the idea of worlds peopled with unconscious “projections” there for the scrutinizing? And who doesn’t want to know what happens when a cute little student presses “B” for “basement” in the elevator of her mentor’s subconscious? Of course, the sheer beauty of the cinematography almost makes me understand why the film editor left the endless shooting scenes in. Almost.

What I found disappointing about “Inception,” was that Director Christopher Nolan didn’t seem to trust that the suspense of a psychological puzzle or the internal worlds of the characters would be compelling enough to drive this movie. If you’re going to whip up a premise like “Inception” and use a word for the title that most people have to crack a dictionary open for, why fall back on matrix-y regurgitations and camera tricks? Beautiful details like the characters’ totems, meaningful dialogue, character development or associations with the fascinating images got lost in the “shoot ‘em up” noisy action formula that invaded the story like—well—a bad dream. The jumble of fantastic images and the mere potential for a great story still make the movie worth seeing, but unfortunately not much to discuss except “so what do you think happened?”