Handling dreams like Russian nested dolls is perhaps not, in itself, the most innovative concept given movies like “The Matrix,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” But rarely has the concept been so intelligently and breathlessly executed as in Chris Nolan’s long-gestating project called, with just as much mystery as the film’s marketing build-up, “Inception.” What has been a dormant (pardon the pun) idea used infrequently has, in Nolan’s hands, been revived as a high-concept effort that exposes the Wachowskis’ first (and only worthwhile) Matrix film as entertaining but self-important pulp fiction, and dream-horror movies as cheap manipulation.

Nolan’s biggest trick, however, is to offer a film that seems like science fiction when really a piece of psychological theatre. One can admire the philosophical and moral quandaries raised by the technological ability to share and influence dreams, especially when Nolan expands with dreams used to plant ideas in people’s minds – the inception of the title. Bound, however, into the layers of a story that on the surface involves an extractor named Dom Cobb who specializes in corporate espionage via illegal dream invasion, is the vast landscape of off-kilter topologies, impossible architectures, memories, and projections from the innermost recesses of the mind. Whose subconscious the film belongs to, of course, is the subject of a plot whose convolutions — beginning with the simple idea of an Ocean’s 13-like band of specialists on a caper and culminating in a psychoanalytical challenge to audiences — Nolan navigates with the confidence of a man in charge of his craft. Inception demands quite the juggling act and, pacing quibbles aside, Nolan delivers an effective balance between modestly surreal but detailed visuals, action pieces, and an ensemble cast of more-than-capable but rarely exuberant actors headed by Leonardo DiCaprio and haunted by Marillon Cotillard.

As happens on occasion with the best effect-driven movies slyly positioned as summer blockbusters, the revelation is not the startling imagery, although Inception does startle. Cities fold in on themselves, gravity malfunctions – Nolan has put to accomplished use the city-building and effects skills he developed while imagining Gotham city for the Batman films, all in the service of a crystalline, multi-level vision. Nor is it that Nolan stages tense action, which at times brings to mind a James Bond movie. The revelation, which defies trailers or summaries, is the extent to which Inception is really a movie about character – abstracted, perhaps, and not necessarily profound but with enough moments of much-needed poignancy to add emotional weight to the visual acrobatics and the script’s often cold intellectualizing. Of this last charge one can say this: for all the visceral and sometimes sappy emotionalism of many films, the very currency of Hollywood melodrama, Inception’s cerebral approach to the material is refreshing even if distancing.

Which is to say there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a puzzle for being a puzzle and not a Valentine Day’s card. With a final shot that winks at audiences and dares us to confront the kind of calculated ambiguity lesser films would deliver as a cheat or a kick between the legs, Inception offers the stuff of savoury arguments and interpretation. This is a film that asks to be considered and not merely consumed. The good news is that once drawn in, the playing field is fairer and more tightly structured than the mush of a Mulholland Drive.

So perhaps, since David Lynch inevitably has to enter the conversation whenever films get weird, one way of solving Inception rests in treating it as an optimistic counterpart to Lost Highway. Like Lynch’s underappreciated phantasmagoria, Inception has the quality of not being a narrative in the conventional sense of a narrative, nor a point of view in the usual storytelling sense. A certain character’s name and behaviour in the film suggests mythological overtones, as if Nolan had loosely patterned the film on the story of Theseus. However dissected, Inception proves to be a potent tonic for the thoughtful cinephile: cinematic, challenging and memorable.

Entertainment: ** (out of two)
Craft: ** (out of two)

Gold star recommendation!

Inception. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine, Dileep Rao and Pete Postlethwaite. 148 minutes. MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of violence and action throughout). Mr. Sisa is Assistant Editor of thefrontpageonline.com

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