Mis-"Inception"

I’m always suspicious of movies that are massively hyped months and months before their release, so I was unimpressed with Inception‘s nonstop promotional drumbeat and the legions of fawning critics. In fact, instead of hurtling myself to the nearest theater on opening weekend, I was able to restrain myself and finally caught a screening of it last night.

Boy, am I glad I waited.

I confess I haven’t seen director Christopher Nolan’s first two films, but I certainly enjoyed Memento (2000). All the Dark Knight hype (especially about the late Heath Ledger’s performance) convinced me that I was going to see a masterpiece. Although I found the first 90 minutes or so absolutely riveting, I thought Nolan gave the film far too many climaxes, which exhausted me and made me really not care how it finally ended. How did it end, anyhow?

Inception also suffers from multiple climaxes (ha!), but it has other problems, too. First of all, it’s incredibly pedantic, with the characters feeling the need to explain the concept every few minutes. A reviewer on IMDB who disliked the film as much as I did summed it up best: it’s a simple action film dressed up as a “thinking person’s” thriller, inviting those who grasp the plot to feel that they’ve accomplished something great. To them all I can say is, “Try reading ‘Naked Lunch,’ pal!”

Although the plot is quite routine, the multiple dream levels, incessant jabbering and shifts in time and locale make it wearying to follow. And when it comes down to it, the entire scenario can be broken down into probably five or six scenes, repeated over and over. You can read about the plot in excruciating detail here if you so desire, but these are the highlights:

A bunch of people run around the world and through self-designed dreamscapes in order to help some powerful rich guy obtain vital energy secrets from some other powerful rich guy. Oh, and the head of the team, Dom Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) is a former Inception architect and now disillusioned burnout, having been accused of murdering his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) and forced to run around the world until his name can be cleared and he can return to the States where his young children await.

So when Saito (Ken Watanabe) proposes to help him do just that in exchange for using Inception to invade the brain of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), heir to a powerful energy magnate (Pete Postlethwaite) who’s just kicked the bucket, he signs on.

Cobb can’t design the dreamscapes anymore, because his late wife keeps popping up in vengeful and murderous forms, so he hires Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young student who is also supposedly a brilliant dream designer, to do the work. He adds a forger, Eames, (Tom Hardy), who can impersonate people that Inception subjects recognize and trust, and a chemist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), who designs the drugs that will put everyone in the Inception kind of mood. Already aboard is his trusted associate, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

The first 20 minutes of the film are completely baffling and obnoxious, and I wanted to pack it in then and there, but when it more or less settled down to tell a story, I thought I’d give it a chance. And 90 agonizing minutes later, I was bound and determined to see it through—no Christopher Nolan movie is going to beat me! Fortunately, there are lots of unintentional laffs to keep it amusing. First of all, the character names—Dom Cobb? Ariadne? Mal? Why didn’t Nolan just name ’em Bubble and Squeak? And if dreamscapes can be designed in any way that the architect wants, why are all the battles with the bad guys your typical smash-and-crash, fought with conventional weaponry? Why couldn’t Ariadne have built in space-age stuff like flying or time-travel? Or Godzilla?

There’s a hilarious scene in which Cobb is describing his life with Mal to his young protege. As he speaks, his monologue is accompanied by hilariously literal images straight out of a high school filmstrip show. For example, when he says something like “We built our life together,” his words are accompanied by the two of them building a sandcastle on the beach. And when he takes Ariadne through the imaginary city he and Mal built when they were stuck in Limbo for 50 dream years (don’t ask), he points out the houses they lived in, which are all tumbledown and half-submerged in water. Inexplicably, he adds, “We always wanted a house, but we always loved this type of building,” accompanying her into one of those impersonal, steel-and-glass high-rises you’d find in Toronto or Dubai. Huh???

I also love the whole jangled concept of Inception itself. The director never shows it explicitly, but the characters must constantly jam intravenous needles into their arms and pump themselves full of drugs to enter the dream state. Nolan even throws in a scene where Cobb is shown to a room full of Inception junkies who voluntarily put themselves under for hours each day because the real world has no meaning for them anymore. It’s just like an opium den.

And everyone’s always talking about how dangerous Inception is, but no one ever seems to hesitate when it’s time to shoot up.

In order to be awakened from their dreams, the team must experience a “kick”—a violent action that will cause them to come back to the real world. It’s actually pretty much like a muscle spasm anybody gets that jolts them into consciousness in the middle of the night. (Don’t you hate those?) In one of the dream levels we visit during the never-ending climax (There are three; in each level one of the team members is conscious while the others are asleep), Arthur finds the other members of the team passed out in a hotel room in which there is no gravity. He must get them somewhere grounded to administer the “kick,” so he bundles them all together like a cord of wood, face to crotch, and “floats” them down the hallway into an elevator. It’s hilarious.

In another level, the unconscious team is riding in a van driven by Yusuf that crashes through a guardrail and falls ever-so-slowly off a bridge, so we’re treated to repeat slo-mo shots of the actors inside, strapped into their seats but looking like orchestra conductors as their arms wave around in the air. Yet another flipping level is set in some sort of military fort in the Great White North that makes you think James Bond or Wolverine is going to pop in at any moment to join the fun. I can’t remember who was passed out in that level. I think it was me.

And Lord help me, about 14 hours into the film, Ariadne tells Cobb that they still have to go somewhere else to do something else, and I realized in horror that she was introducing another act. DAMN YOU, ARIADNE! Man, I really needed a “kick” at that point. I won’t reveal the “A-HA!” ending, but let me just say it was really risible.

I didn’t recognize the actor who played Fischer’s godfather and trusted right-hand man, but just now, as I was going over the credits on IMBD, I see that it’s Tom Berenger. My God—was he wearing a mask or did he go to Mickey Rourke’s plastic surgeon? Whoops—look at the picture. I vote for Rourke’s surgeon.

As for the other actors, DiCaprio displays his trademark intense, eye-bulging snarl throughout most of the film. He’s such a committed actor that he brings real dedication to some of the film’s most ludicrous lines, adding to the unintentional yucks. Page looks too young for her part, and Cotillard, so magnificent in her Oscar-winning turn as Edith Piaf, is one of those Gallic beauties America can’t seem to figure out what to do with.

With his glacial eyes and androgynous face, Murphy always looks like an alien to me, and it’s off-putting when he’s playing a regular human being. Gordon-Levitt is given the film’s very few laugh lines, but they’re trampled to death by the frenetic editing and blasting score. Speaking of the score, Hans Zimmer seems to have written enough music for four or five films but decided to use it all. The soundtrack hammers at you constantly to remind you that you’re watching a super-duper, “important” action movie.

Inception is certainly not the first film to utilize dreams in its plot. Some of them are much better and cost a fraction of its budget. David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) comes to mind, although the characters are technically trapped in a videogame rather than a dream, but it works the same and is a lot more fun. Alex Proyas‘ Dark City (1998) combines interesting visuals with an much more intriguing plot. And Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is a true dream masterpiece. Hell, even Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 Brainstorm, which was plagued with multiple problems during production—most tragically the accidental death of star Natalie Wood—had more memorable moments than this frenetic, self-important piece of bombast.

And what was that other movie that was set inside a dream? Oh, yeah…

Scorsese Gets Scary

I went to two screenings at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences this past weekend. One of the films I was ambivalent about, but the other I was anxious to see. Saturday was Brit director Martin Campbell’s remake of his 1985 miniseries Edge of Darkness, telescoped into feature film length and tailored for Mel Gibson (attempting to recapture his action hero crown). Retro and Death Wish-y, it features Mel grimacing blearily between “shock” deaths and a slew of corporate villains of the “nyah-ha-ha” variety led by Danny Huston, who really should be wearing an eyepatch and petting a cat. It was nothing more or less than I expected, but it’s too boring to provide bad movie fun.

Sunday was the one I was waiting for, Martin Scorsese’s new psychological thriller Shutter Island, and I have to say it’s a mixed bag. I don’t blame the direction, cinematography, production design or acting—they’re all excellent. What I do blame is the screenplay. After dangling more red herrings than you’d find at a St. Olaf fish fry, it arrives at a denouement that makes the viewer say…”Oh.” Not only do you solve the mystery earlier than the filmmakers would like, it’s also a letdown.

Certainly there are pleasures to be had. Scorsese is a marvelous filmmaker, and he clearly relishes taking a stab at this genre. And all the tech specs are superb. The island is an isolated, foreboding place, shrouded in fog when it’s not in the teeth of a full-fledged hurricane, and the “extremely disturbed” ward of the mental hospital at which the story is set is a stone-cold, gray building left over from the Civil War that you’d easily expect to find Frankenstein’s monster lumbering through. I was excited by the possibility that this was going to be his version of The Shining.

The story, in short: Leonardo DiCaprio (still rocking his Baw–ston accent from The Departed), stars as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. marshal with a troubled past who journeys to a remote island off Massachusetts to investigate reports of a murderess who has escaped from the Ashecliff Hospital for the Criminally Insane, headed by Dr. Crawley (Ben Kingsley). Teddy and his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), uncover a series of conspiracies and plot twists that lead them to conclude that the hospital is conducting sinister human experiments for the government. There’s more, but I’m not going to give away any spoilers.

DiCaprio, making his fourth film for Scorsese, spends much of the running time looking like he’s ready to explode, as seen in the above photo. Michelle Williams plays Teddy’s wife, Dolores, who had died in a house fire two years before and appears to him as a kind of friendly ghost, warning him to leave the island. Mark Ruffalo makes for an agreeable sidekick. The legendary Max Von Sydow seems to be having a field day as the might-be-evil Dr. Naehring whom Teddy suspects is an escaped Nazi. Silence of the Lambs‘ own Buffalo Bill himself, Ted Levine, plays the head warden in what amounts to a cameo, as does Jackie Earle Haley, the Comeback Kid, as one of the inmates in the “extreme” ward. There are lots of flashbacks and fantasy sequences to keep the proceedings interesting, although I have to question the filmmakers’ taste in showing the frozen bodies of concentration camp victims stacked like firewood at Dachau for shock effect.

And it’s all so very serious. Scene after scene is brimming with import and significance.The audience I watched it with appreciated the very few moments of bleak humor, as when Teddy is interviewing inmates about the missing patient. Here Scorsese reminds us of how great he is at populating his films with interesting characters.

Shutter Islandruns the risk of becoming risible, but it avoids that pitfall. What it does become is boring after a riveting 90-or-so-minutes and you’ve solved the puzzle. Evidently it’s been more or less faithfully adapted from Dennis Lehane’s book of the same name, so there you go.

Shutter Island, while not a total failure, is sadly flawed. It’s middling Scorsese, but middling Scorsese is still superior to some of the very best dreck other directors put out. I’m not namin‘ names, but what’s that Chesapeake body of water in Maryland called—and what kind of window do you put in your living room to look at it? Ahem.

FLASH—The loose remake of George Romero’s The Crazies opened to surprisingly strong reviews and boxoffice last weekend, so expect to see an analysis of that film on this blog soon.