The New Republic

I couldn't disagree more with this characterization of Inception as witty, graceful, light-on-its-feet, deft, fun, etc. These words describe Hitchcock movies. Inception was humorless, pretentious, clunky, and dull by contrast. Far from taking the plot -- Hitchcock's "MacGuffins" -- with a grain of salt, this movie is dominated by explaining, in turgid detail with non-stop inane chatter, the particulars of the conceit. The movie spends more time explaining the rules of the game than playing it, and, when it does play it, it feels like it's running out the clock. The following is well-observed: "It’s true that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Mr. Cobb has a wound and a loss, plus a destiny we want to see fulfilled, but they are borne lightly, as if to say, well, an actor needs a character and a situation, so let it be this—it’s like choosing the top hat, the dog, or the boot in Monopoly." Because of this, nothing feels at stake. We don't care about the wound, the loss, the destiny, and so we don't care what happens, which is necessary to enjoy a movie. My theory about why people aren't bored out of their minds watching bits of make-believe is not that they care about the plot or the MacGuffin, but that they care about the people -- that even escapist entertainment is, in the end, "character-driven." The characterization need not be complex, or literary, or even true to life, in order to capture our attention. We need a reason to give a shit. Often in light entertainment, chracterization comes in the form of, at a minimum, a *personality*. DiCaprio's character lacks personality. He's just a vessel for the silly plot. He's a big MacGuffin himself -- the due diligence, the thing that doesn't really matter. But once plot and character are zeroed out, there's nothing left to care about, and you just want to leave. Are the images beautiful, arresting,or witty? Not so much. The dreamscapes mostly resemble banal reality, like a rainy afternoon in an anonymous downtown city, scene of one of several tedious shoot-em-ups. Dreams are actually weird, freaky, trippy. These dreams are not remotely dreamlike. They don't scratch the surface of what dreams, or the unruly subconscious, are like. We get inside human heads and what do we find? Something unsettling, disorienting, intriguing? Nah, we just find another mundane battleground for some action sequence that pales next to Bond or Bourne. Do characters crack jokes, or crack smiles? Nope. (Remember, they don't have personalities.) How about the music? Any Hermann-esque style? Nope. Hans Zimmer blasts a lot of noise in rhythmic pulses, as if to say, This Is a Big Deal -- not We Are Having Fun. The love of DiCaprio's life, for the most of the movie, is a demonic presence. The drama of the film -- what little there is -- is downbeat, and surrounds an ugly suicide. Altogether, the general feel alternates between dull and sour. Panache of a comedy? I'm unconvinced that Thomson saw the movie, or stayed awake. Perhaps this reflects his dream version. It injects a little play into the last moment, but of the cliched, chessy sort, like tacking a question mark onto "The End," and serves merely to convince us of what we already knew -- that nothing that happened before was worth caring about.

- JakeH

July 22, 2010 at 12:33pm

Brilliant flicker. We get to eavesdrop upon a therapy session between Ahab and Carl Jung. Wonderful stuff. Atta a boy, Christopher Nolan!

- jacko

July 23, 2010 at 11:05am

People seem to be split on this one. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a playful homage to multiple past genres, from the one last heist to Freud with a side of Hitchcock (or vice versa) to Tarkovski’s slow-motion symphony of memory, dream and reality…there was even an obvious nod to Fred Astaire’s Royal Wedding. This dream-within-a-dream tesseract is genre-within-a-genre, Borgesian Noir. More playful then original, it invites, and eventually forces multiple interpretations.It brings to mind Ecos’s "opera aperta" where meaning meanders freely un-imprisoned. The film itself is an inception a seed where interpretations uncertainty and doubt grow like ivy in the mind. If you let them. It may require an acquired taste, to which naysayers may answer “so does poo”. I’m not commenting to tell people why they should like it…only why I liked it (and I don’t –yet- like poo). In the end for me Nolan wove a entertaining jaunt into hyper-reality, which is everything I ask for when I go to a movie.

- gzenone

July 23, 2010 at 3:35pm

Why is Salt, a disposable star vehicle, better than Inception, a supposed modern classic? The answer lies in the fundamentals. Character: I said before that even escapist entertainment is character-driven, because caring about the characters is a prerequisite to caring about what happens to them. You like Jolie from the start, and are invested in what happens to her. The same can't be said about DiCaprio's character. Why not? DiCaprio is an excellent actor. But Jolie has the charisma of a movie star. DiCaprio looks and sounds boyish and twerpy and needs strong material to shine, as he did in Aviator and Revolutionary Road. Jolie needs only her easily expressive face and screen presence. Both Salt and Inception begin with the familiar trick of placing the hero in peril from the git-go, but Salt immediately takes a step back to allow the character to project intelligence, charm, and warmth, such that when we're plunged into the action ten minutes in, we're already sold. You could argue that Inception concerns a mystery about Cobb, and the movie has to maintain some distance from him. But Salt even more obviously concerns a mystery about its hero -- is she a good guy or a bad guy, "Who Is Salt?" It doesn't matter! We root for her even when the evidence suggests that we should reconsider our allegiance. Inspiring loyalty that leads us to suspend rational inquiry and moral judgment is the stuff of movies and story-telling. You might even say that it's the stuff of love. As Hitchcock, Wilder, and countless lesser Hollywood hacks knew, movies are a romance. Since the wonderfully engaging Memento, Nolan seems to have forgotten that. Action: What happens to this character we care about? She's chased. Chases are better than shoot-outs, because they move. They distill the notion of suspense to its essence. The action in Salt is well choreographed and shot -- more sweepy than jolty, thankfully -- and it feels taut. *This* is fun. For all its movement from dreamscape to dreamscape, the actual set pieces in Inception are curiously static and dull. Plot Construction/Length: We don't need to be rigid about this in the manner of Screenwriting for Dummies -- as in, you must have three acts, divided by two plot points. But it's worth noting that Salt follows a familiar pattern and sustains our interest, whereas Inception is ponderous and meandering. Having established a character we care about and plunging her into the action, Salt pulls the rug out twice at well-spaced intervals on its way to a satisfying conclusion a mere 90 minutes later. Done and done. Inception is a full hour longer, and it never pivots. I believe the technical term is "switcheroo." Inception doesn't have any. It just plays out the caper more-or-less according to plan, with some fresh perils thrown in that feel arbitrary. It peels away Cobb's character, but the reveal packs no punch, because something of the sort had been telegraphed ad nauseum and, as I said, we don't care about Cobb anyway. The half-assed suggestion at the end that we might still be in a dream doesn't count, although something of the sort could have worked if Nolan had taken the trouble to work it out. Imagine a movie that starts the third act with a revelation that everything you thought was happening was really in DiCaprio's head, that his subconscious was being invaded by extractors not working for him but who are on some other more interesting mission, that DiCaprio is laboring under an implanted idea, that he and not Cillian Murphy is the target of the caper -- something along those lines. Too obvious? Maybe, unless it's all skillfully befogged and revealed. (Some have suggested that Nolan was actually going for something like this, and that it's so well befogged that I missed it, and that you have to see it twice or thrice in order to decipher the clues, and so forth. I doubt that this is what's going on, but, even if it is, I don't go to the movies for a homework assignment. Seeing it once should be enough to understand what happened.) Music: Inception's score goes like this: "Booooom. Booooom. Booooom. Booooom." Salt's, of the Bourne school, goes like this: "Ta-ta-Ta-ta-Ta-ta-Ta-ta-Ta-ta-Ta-ta-Ta-ta-Ta-ta." This is a nice illustration of the difference between the two movies. Slow and bellowing vs. quick and light. Sex: Here, Salt doesn't score so well. The elimination of sex from the genre, in favor of a fanboy's vision of what's sexy, is a whole other topic under the heading The Decline and Fall of the Hollywood Thriller. I suppose that Jolie's sex appeal was enough to check off this box, though barely. But Inception has zero sex appeal. *That's* certainly not Hitchcockian! Cotillard is mostly a demon presence or off her nut. There's not a hint of a real relationship there. Page's sex doesn't register in her anticeptic role. On the whole, Inception is ironically barren and lifeless.

- JakeH

July 26, 2010 at 3:18pm