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Inception
herine Bray
The Lord Of The Rings ushered elves and orcs into the cinematic mainstream, The Matrix made computer hackers cool and Twilight somehow made fancying werewolves an acceptable cultural norm. Witness the power of film.
Now, with Inception, director Christopher Nolan rehabilitates that old daytime TV soap cliche: "...and I woke up and it was all a dream." No longer a shoddy excuse to wrap up a narrative that's going nowhere, in Nolan's capable hands a dream is a place where real danger, real drama and some of the most elegantly sculpted, visually stimulating landscapes you'll see all year unfold for your viewing pleasure. And there's only one scene where it all looks a bit like a Sony Bravia advert. Impressive. Most impressive.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a conflicted thief heading up a team whose aim is to pull off a heist in reverse, inside a man's mind. This is a film that benefits from not knowing too much about the set-up before you see it, so let's simply say that while Cobb's normal scam is to extract ideas from his subject's subconscious, here his challenge is to plant an idea. This process is known as inception. He's confident it can be done, but the subconscious is a dangerous place, and like all the best heist movies, he'll need assistance from a crack team boasting various skills.
Like Nolan's The Dark Knight, there is no weak link in the cast. It's one of DiCaprio's best performances, but this ensemble thriller is never unbalanced by the A-list star power of its lead. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is wry and likeable as Cobb's right hand man, Arthur, exchanging understated banter with Tom Hardy (Bronson), who is entirely suited to playing a charmingly dissolute English forger. Cillian Murphy, who often seems ill at ease in Everyman roles, is perfect as an elite Murdoch-in-waiting rich boy. Ellen Page draws the short straw as Ariadne, the character frequently called upon to ask questions eliciting explanations for the benefit of the audience, or to provide exposition on her own terms. At least she gets an extremely knowing name.
It's Marion Cotillard who provides the creepy heart of the film, the skewed emotional touchstone. To say why would spoil things, but she provides a revelatory riposte to those who have found Nolan's work to date too cold and artful. This character brushes aside the entrancing distractions of Inception's industrial origami landscapes and slices to the heart of a timelessly tragic imperative - the need to let go of love for the sake of remaining true to what made it meaningful. I saw Inception twice, the second time on an IMAX screen where the haunting Hans Zimmer score and sheer scale of the film made a huge impact, and, like a recurring dream, it felt more uncanny on a second viewing. But the love story, embedded deep in the root of what makes the film work, doesn't need any bells and whistles to ring true.
Inception is not especially original in its sources: this is all about the execution. This is Nightmare On Elm Street minus the bogeyman, The Matrix stripped of the naff cod-philosophy, with a helping of Blade Runner's existential uncertainty played out in a landscape designed in a partnership between MC Escher and Stanley Kubrick. Like the best dreams, Inception has more resonance than a simple breakdown of reference points can hope to convey.
In the 1946 classic A Matter Of Life And Death, which also deals with death, love, illusion and the power of the mind, Roger Livesey says "a weak mind isn't strong enough to hurt itself. Stupidity has saved many a man from going mad." The implication, shared with Inception, is that there is nothing more dangerous than ideas, nothing more potentially destructive than your own mind, particularly if you are lucky enough to be in possession of a very fine mind. So please - take care of yourself in there, Mr Nolan.
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