INCEPTION

Inception (2010) is the latest movie by director Christopher Nolan, who has helmed films like Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Insomnia, The Prestige and Memento. Little, simple, linear movies are not the hunting grounds for Nolan. He makes multi-layered movies in which usually the time goes back and forth. In Inception, the layers are even more literal.

The plot describes a world like our, but in which technology exists that allows people to get in other people’s dreams. In some cases, this is used to share dreams. In some others, people called extractors go into someone’s dream to steal secrets. For such an operation, a team is needed, usually comprised by an architect, who shapes the dreamscape; an operator, who deal with some practical matters, like security, within the dream; sometimes a ‘shapeshifter’, someone who can deceive the subject of the dream into believing this person is someone else; and the extractor himself.

Dreams, in this movie, are very clear narratives in which the absurdities tend to follow a logical path that is usually guided by the imagination and will of the architect. The apparent contradiction with how we usually experience dreams — fragmentary, vague, jumpy pieces of life — is explained simply by stating that all the confusion is actually added later, when we wake up, while when we are in the dream we simply experience it and accept is as normal.

Leonardo diCaprio is Dom Cobb, an extractor, according to himself the best there is. He used to be an architect, but not anymore. He had to leave his children and his home in United States and he can’t come back because he was accused of a crime. But a tycoon offers Cobb the chance to have the charge removed, if he does the impossible: not to steal an idea, but to plant one in someone’s mind, a process called inception.

Cobb creates a very complex plan that involves going into three levels of dream with a team of six individuals. On top of the obvious difficulties, there are two complications: Cobb’s dead wife tends to show up derailing his plans in the dream world — she is a ghost from his subconscious. The second one has to do with the regular mechanism that makes the extractors wake up, which is to die within the dream, but which, in this case, does not work. Given the multi-layered nature of this dream, if the people in the dream die, they go to limbo, which is the realm of subconscious.

This construction is amazing, not only the logical construction, but the visual edifice, the action scenes, the suspense and the concepts involved. The core question, of course, when you have such real narratives in dreams is: how do you know what is a dream and what is reality? This is a question that has been regularly explored since the times of Plato, and possibly before that. Although the movie does not dwell in this question, you can see it suggested in the most essential scenes of the film. Don’t we all live trying to make our dreams come true? If they come true, does it really matter that they are not real?

If I have to find negative points in Inception, I can think of two, and they both involve the main actors. Both diCaprio and Ellen Page (Ariadne, the architect) are excellent actors, but perhaps because Nolan was too busy with an extremely complicated plot (he also wrote and produced the movie) and a million details involved in an extraordinary visual and action landscape, he seemed to have forgotten the emotional depth the characters, in particular Cobb, should have portrayed. The plot is telling us this is a desperate character, on the verge of psychological collapse, capable of doing anything to come back to his children, pursued by ghosts and drowned in pain, but diCaprio does not show that, at least not with the intensity and sincerity needed to convey this emotional picture. In most of the movie, that is fine, because the action does not give Cobb the chance to be submerged in those feelings. But every once in a while you feel that tears or screams or a semi-catatonic state are in order. The artifacts of his mind invading the dream tell us what is happening inside him, but not his face nor his voice or his body.

Ariadne, on the other hands, seem to have too many answers for someone who is so new to the game. She figures out things too easily, and keeps her head cool, even in very dangerous circumstances, and (at least for me), that makes the character unreal, a bit unbelievable. This is not a problem of acting or directing, but of character development, and I would think that the problem lies in the writing. It does not help that Ellen Page looks so young. Although we know the character is brilliant, we also know that some responses come from wisdom, and wisdom is not only intelligence and knowledge, but also experience.

Still, these are minor problems. In a lesser movie, they would be more important, but in Inception, we are drank with amazing images and ideas that are masterfully exposed. One more point: Hans Zimmer, the music composer, has given us a wonderful soundtrack, something that seems like an auditory train: tremendous, frightening, unstoppable; something that carry us through this extraordinary ride.