Christopher Nolan, the British-born director of “Memento” and of the two most recent Batman movies, appears to believe that if he can do certain things in cinema—especially very complicated things—then he has to do them. But why? To what end? His new movie, “Inception,” is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly. Nolan has devoted his extraordinary talents not to some weighty, epic theme or terrific comic idea but to a science-fiction thriller that exploits dreams as a vehicle for doubling and redoubling action sequences. He has been contemplating the movie for ten years, and as movie technology changed he must have realized that he could do more and more complex things. He wound up overcooking the idea. Nolan gives us dreams within dreams (people dream that they’re dreaming); he also stages action within different levels of dreaming—deep, deeper, and deepest, with matching physical movements played out at each level—all of it cut together with trombone-heavy music by Hans Zimmer, which pounds us into near-deafness, if not quite submission. Now and then, you may discover that the effort to keep up with the multilevel tumult kills your pleasure in the movie. “Inception” is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else.
The outer shell of the story is an elaborate caper. Leonardo DiCaprio, with a full head of golden hair and a touch of goatee, plays Cobb, an international thief. Not a common thief, but an “extractor”: he puts himself to sleep, enters the dreams of another person, then rummages around and steals something important that pops out of the sleeper’s unconscious—an industrial secret, say. Saito (Ken Watanabe), the head of an enormous Japanese energy company, hires Cobb to go beyond extraction to inception; that is, not to steal an idea but to plant one that the dreamer will think is his own. Just like Danny Ocean preparing to crack a safe, Cobb assembles a larcenous crew, who will enter the mark’s dreams with him. There’s a dream architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), who can create convincing interior worlds, so that the dreamer will think that everything is real. There’s a forger, Eames (Tom Hardy), who, in the dreams, can embody any person known to the dreamer. There’s a chemist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), to drop both the team and the target into deeper layers of sleep with a super-sedative. And there’s a kind of dream manager, a demanding, unimaginative sourpuss named Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to insure that the fantastic sting comes off.
There’s also a wild card. Cobb’s dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keeps jumping out of the lower reaches of his mind bearing a knife or a gun and crashing into the created dreams. Cobb is still in love with her, and feels guilty about something he did to her. Occasionally, he takes a rusty old elevator down to his subconscious and visits her. Cotillard, with her amber coloring, is ravishing and tear-stained, and, if you don’t pinch yourself too hard, you might be convinced that this science-fiction conceit is a modern Orpheus-and-Eurydice story of doomed love, complete with visits to the underworld. As it is, these scenes are the only humanly involving elements in the movie. The rest is strenuous process. Shaking off his wife problem, Cobb leads his fellows into the dreams of a suave executive named Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and convinces him that his dying father (Pete Postlethwaite), the ornery head of another giant energy company, wants him to break up the firm. This will benefit Saito and also prevent world domination by Fischer (or something of that sort—the point is glossed over). Cobb agrees to attempt inception for one reason: Saito has promised to pull some strings that will allow him to return to his two young children in America, where he is wanted as a fugitive, charged with the crime of killing Mal.
Summarizing the movie makes it sound saner than it is. For long stretches, you’re not sure whether you’re in dream or reality, which isn’t nearly as much fun as Nolan must have imagined it to be. Bizarre oddities, which complicate the puzzle but are meaningless in themselves, flash by in an instant. The actors, trying to suggest familiarity with the task of dream invasion, spin off gibberish in the most casual way. Parodies, I assume, will follow on YouTube. And the theologians of pop culture, taking a break from “The Matrix,” will analyze the over-articulate structure of “Inception” for mighty significances. Dreams, of course, are a fertile subject for moviemakers. Buuel created dream sequences in the teasing masterpieces “Belle de Jour” (1967) and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), but he was not making a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar thriller. He hardly needed to bother with car chases and gun battles; he was free to give his work the peculiar malign intensity of actual dreams. Buuel was a surrealist— Nolan is a literal-minded man. Cobb’s intercranial adventures aren’t like dreams at all—they’re like different kinds of action movies jammed together. Buildings explode or collapse, anonymous goons shoot at the dreammakers. Buuel silently pushed us into reveries and left us alone to enjoy our wonderment, but Nolan is working on so many levels of representation at once that he has to lay in pages of dialogue just to explain what’s going on. At one point, Ariadne asks, “Wait—whose subconscious are we going into, exactly?,” and the audience laughs. It’s the only moment when Nolan acknowledges the nuttiness of his movie.
