This Time the Dream’s on Me

The relationship between movies and dreams has always been — to borrow a term from psychoanalysis — overdetermined. From its first flickerings around the time Freud was working on “The Interpretation of Dreams,” cinema seemed to replicate the uncanny, image-making power of the mind, much as still photography had in the decades before. And over the course of the 20th century, cinema provided a vast, perpetually replenishing reservoir of raw material for the fantasies of millions of people. Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he were writing now, he would have to acknowledge that they are also, for many of us, made out of movies.

And movies, more often than not these days, are made out of other movies. “Inception,” Christopher Nolan’s visually arresting, noir-tinged caper, is as packed with allusions and citations as a film studies term paper. Admirers of Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” will find themselves in good company, though “Inception” does not come close to matching the impact of those durable cult objects. It trades in crafty puzzles rather than profound mysteries, and gestures in the direction of mighty philosophical questions that Mr. Nolan is finally too tactful, too timid or perhaps just too busy to engage.

So “Inception” is not necessarily the kind of experience you would take to your next shrink appointment. It is more like a diverting reverie than a primal nightmare, something to be mused over rather than analyzed, something you may forget as soon as it’s over. Which is to say that the time — nearly two and a half hours — passes quickly and for the most part pleasantly, and that you see some things that are pretty amazing, and amazingly pretty: cities that fold in on themselves like pulsing, three-dimensional maps; chases and fights that defy the laws that usually govern space, time and motion; Marion Cotillard’s face.

Ms. Cotillard, her most famous movie role evoked by occasional eruptions of Édith Piaf on the “La Vie en Rose” soundtrack, is the film’s principal enigma and its chief signifier of emotion. She is not, however, exactly a character in “Inception.” Rather, at least as far as a first-time viewer can guess, she is a projection in the subconscious of her husband, a specialist in corporate mental espionage known as Cobb and played by Leonardo DiCaprio with some of the same twitchy melancholy he brought to “Shutter Island.”