Inception is structured like an existential heist movie. Cobb assembles a crack team of experts (principally Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Page) whose mission is to drug the heir into a deep sleep, break into his unconscious and rig his dreams. In the process, they descend through deeper and deeper levels of dreamscape—dreams within dreams. Inside those imaginary worlds, however, what happens is not so metaphysical. It’s the stuff of high-octane action movies, with enough car chases, shootouts and pyrotechnics to overstock a James Bond movie.
“What I tried to do in Inception is build on what I’d done with Memento,” says Nolan, who spent a decade refining the script. Memento’s mind-bending narrative unfolded in reverse chronological order, driven by a protagonist with no memory. “It was an unusual structure,” explains the 39-year-old British director, “but the tropes were very familiar from film noir, from crime movies: the gun in the drawer, the tied-up man in the closet. Here we tried to do the same thing with action movie tropes.”
Shot in six countries, with set pieces ranging from a weightless brawl in a hotel corridor to a gun battle on skis in Alberta, it’s as if Bond has been given a licence to break the laws of physics. “We’re taking the cinematic candy, the things we all love in Hollywood blockbusters,” says Nolan, “and giving them a reason to be there that you haven’t seen before.”
One trick Nolan has never used before is slow motion. Until now, he’d rejected it as an overworked cliché in action movies. But Inception’s pivotal conceit is that dream time is slower than real time, because the brain works faster. “That,” he says, “is an example of where we take a blockbuster device and try to give it meaning and purpose.”
Which begs the question: might there be too much meaning and purpose for a summer crowd seeking escape? At the L.A. media preview, the overwhelming consensus was positive, but many worried the movie may be too smart for the average car-crash connoisseur. It falls on Page’s character to guide the audience through the film’s conceptual maze. “She’s the newcomer to the team,” says Nolan. “She has to ask the questions.” Page’s intellectual curiosity made her ideal for the role, he adds. “Ellen just radiates intelligence. She’s not someone who’s going to accept something she’s told. And she has a massive role—it’s tough to do exposition, to be the character asking why.”
In fact, Inception’s script is so laden with exposition that it would seem to break a cardinal role of screenwriting: show, don’t tell. But Nolan insists “the heist movie is the one genre where exposition is not just allowed—it’s demanded.”
DiCaprio’s role provides emotional ballast, and he invests it with the tunnel-vision intensity that has become his signature of late. He has an obsessive love interest, albeit a dead one. Cobb’s late wife (Marion Cotillard) keeps popping up in the dreamscapes as a femme fatale threatening to derail the mission, and she lends the drama a dark undertow of intrigue. “There isn’t a lot of emotion in a heist movie,” says Nolan, explaining that it was DiCaprio who insisted emotion drive the narrative.
In L.A., DiCaprio said Inception is “like a giant therapy session,” and there are striking parallels between Cobb and the haunted soul he played in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island. When I asked him about it, the actor agreed they’re “both locked in a dream world and going on some kind of cathartic journey,” but argued that “this film couldn’t have been more different in terms of its execution.”
True. While Scorsese takes a classical approach, Nolan seems intent on rewiring Hollywood’s DNA. He’s a Dr. Frankenstein trying to implant a brain in the body of a blockbuster. Some people will see Inception because they want “to think and ask questions and be moved,” says Page. But it’s also okay “to go just for bad-assed action sequences and a bag of popcorn.” At least that’s what she’s telling the folks back home in Halifax.
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