Sweet Dreams

Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Cillian Murphy
4/5 stars

The first rule you learn in Creative Writing 101 is to never end a story with “It was all a dream!” The development of Inception’s narrative leading up to its conclusion is too complicated for it to fall victim to this writing cliché. But then you start to wonder, with previous films such as Memento and Insomnia, how long will it take before writer/director Christopher Nolan finally exhausts all other alternatives? Maybe there will be a lot of upset people in a couple of years with Nolan’s upcoming follow-up to The Dark Knight, when they find out that Batman never really existed.

With Inception, Nolan is doing what he does best: taking a somewhat trite plot device or tired story concept and adding his own nuanced twist. He extrapolates from the dream cliché, creating a story that in itself blurs and fiercely questions the distinction between reality and dreams. Heck, the fact that he situated this concept into an action-heist narrative is a bonus at this point.

Just as he did with Memento (although with a vastly different approach), Inception is a textbook example of the difference between plot and story. Nolan achieves this distinction in Memento through chronology. With Inception he does it through degrees of complexity. The story is incredibly complex, but the general plot is entertainingly simple.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Dominic Cobb, an “extractor” who infiltrates the minds of others to steal ideas from their subconscious. Cobb and his partner Arthur, played by an increasingly likeable Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are hired by a businessman (Ken Watanabe) to do the unthinkable: enter the mind of rival businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), not to steal an idea, but to implant a new one. It’s not extraction; it’s inception.

With the benefits outweighing the risks, Cobb accepts the assignment, and he and Arthur begin to recruit a ragtag team for the job, including someone to construct the dream world within Fischer’s mind. Cobb discovers a bright graduate student named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to be his architect, a job he is unable to do himself because of the traumatic memories which haunt his own dreams.

The film’s ingenuity arises from its seemingly clear transitions between realities and unrealities – transitions which garner increasing doubts as the film progresses, and which function under the guise of the heist-genre style of the plot.

Indeed, the film’s apparent lack of surrealism is what I originally found slightly frustrating about the narrative, considering so much of it takes place in dreamscape. The first half of the picture is devoted to the methodological planning of the inception, contextualized within a world where dream extraction not only goes unexplained, but also unquestioned. The visually stunning dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream inception operates within a relatively straightforward, action-movie formula. It features everything from a car chase in a rainy downtown metropolis, to a very intricate fight sequence in a hotel building, to a semi-militarized break-in at a snowy mountain fortress.

As much as I was impressed with the story’s concept and entertained by the plot’s structure and the film’s visual aspects, I couldn’t help but have a lot of questions. Why is Ariadne not the least bit suspicious when Cobb first explains the concept of being able to create and enter dream worlds inside others’ minds? Even Neo from The Matrix needed a lot of convincing upon his “I don’t believe it” response after learning the world he knew wasn’t really reality. It felt as though Page’s character was written as a mere superfluous device to move the plot along.

Aside from his recent collaborative history with Nolan, why is Michael Caine thrown into this movie for a mere five minutes of screen time to play a clearly expendable character?

Why is Nolan’s conceptualization of dreams as (un)reality so literal? What is significant about dream extraction and inception? How did it come about and why is it important? I can summarize all of these questions by asking, simply put, how did we get here?

But then, I realized in retrospect, Cobb rhetorically asks that same question on separate occasions to both Ariadne and Fischer in order to expose the dream worlds they’re in as unreality. Suddenly Cobb’s own back-story can be understood in a new light: all of the realities that are taken for granted throughout the film should come under question.

It is difficult to be critical of any transitory, fleeting, exuberant or inexplicable aspect of this film, therefore, if only because that’s what dreams are.