Deception

ATTENTION! If you are some kind of fucking idiot and haven't figured out everything that happens in Inception from the trailers, then spoilers.

The cinematic progenitor of Christopher Nolan's new movie, Inception, is the catastrophically ridiculous Robin Williams vehicle, What Dreams May Come. What it lacks in goofy black guardian angels, it makes up for in its grotesquely impoverished view of the human imagination. Empowered to create one's own reality, the best that anyone can do in What Dreams is plop themselves into your secretary's Best-of-the-Impressionists wall calendar. But Chris Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister--and really, was there ever a more apropos name?--can't even manage Monet. The visual experience of Inception left me with the distinct impression that I had been drugged by a circa-1999 Tom Ford for Gucci ad and then mercilessly date-raped by his shiny partner, a Lexus commercial. I kept expecting "The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection" to dash across the screen in some boldly sans-serif font. I kept expecting the lease options.

The setup of Inception is supposed to be a brain-teaser. Leonardo DiCaprio and his Jerry Bruckheimer band of specialists (The Chemist, the Forger, the Architect . . . Oh, Lord) invade people's dreams and steal their ideas, or in the case of the central action in this instance, plant a bug of a new idea in someone's brain. Here, they are trying to convince the sharp-jawed, Savile-row scion of some kind of Charles Foster Kane energy executive that what he really wants to do is break up his dad's monopoly. This all has something to do with Ken Watanabe, who runs a rival company? Whatever. The movie doesn't care. Because the fundamental conflict that drives the entire narrative is so hastily and poorly sketched, the dour, totalitarian porentousness of the proceedings seems more than a tad overwrought. Well, this is Christopher Nolan, after all, who played a story about a man who dresses up like a bat in order to karate-chop Bond villians with a straighter face than a community-theater production of Lear, so I'm not sure what else I expected. Inception trips in at well over two hours, which according to the exhaustively-repeated conceit of the film itself is well over a billion years of dream-time, and it contains a single joke. I counted. It involved Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose high, tight ass is the only thing I recall fondly of my wasted time in the theater, and Ellen Page sharing a brief kiss, and the whole movie seems ashamed of it. This is serious.

Anyway, the differing speed of the passage of time is just a part of the larger conceit, which is that not only can Leonardo et al. invade dreams, but that by descending into ever-deeper states of unconsciousness, they can concoct dreams-within-dreams. Even as action/scifi fare this is pretty thin gruel, and since Nolan insists on cluttering the goings-on with pages and pages of expository dialogue full of crackpot ontology and two-joint epistemological impoderables, the whole edifice reeks faintly of the ridiculous. In his silly but entertaining Existenz, which had the misfortune to come out opposite The Matrix, Croneberg managed with much greater ease and humor to trip the lysergical-acidic borders of multiple mind-states and alternate consciousness. In Inception, dreams sit neatly within dreams like Matryoshka dolls, everything just-so, ascent and descent symbolized by Leonardo DiCaprio's rickety dream-elevator (no, really), which, obviously, plies a linear path from top to bottom. By the way, this constant mentioning of other movies is intentional. Inception is the most derivative film ever made, so shameless in its cribbing that you'd think it were meant as pastiche, except for its relentless, monotonous self-seriousness.

The characters in Inception keep asking each other if they remember how they got there, there being here, or there, or where they are, or whatever, the point being that “in a dream,” three words repeated with talismanic frequency, as if the filmmakers thought we might forget, you only ever find yourself in media res, with no recollection of how you arrived at the bar, so to speak. It was a familiar feeling. As the movie dragged into its third hour, I began to feel something similar myself. How did I get here? and, Please let this all be a dream. The punishing score, which Hans Zimmer ripped off from Eyes Wide Shut, drones at merciless volume throughout, and by the time Joseph Gordon-Levitt was floating around weightlessly and everyone else was attacking Cobra Commander's arctic lair (no, really), I thought I might burst an eardrum. Ellen Page, who sometime in the first hour demonstrated a remarkable capacity to fold dream-Paris back on itself and generally bend reality like Neo meets MC Escher is along for the ride, but doesn't actully do anything once the action gets underway, other than harrass DiCaprio for imprisonining his memory of his dead wife in, um, the basement? In the hotel room where she committed suicide. Jesus Christ, Nolan, eat a fucking muffin. Schindler's List had more laughs. By the way, the wife-in-the-limbo-of-her-own-imagining, that too is ripped off from What Dreams May Come. Inception isn't a movie. It's an exquisite corpse. A mash-up.

The visual effects have been widely praised, but I found them dull and uninspired. The whole film is flat, colorless, and corporate. My dreams are a lot less Prada and a lot more Alexander McQueen, if you know what I'm saying. Everything is shot at flat angles, and the interminable gun battles and hallway fisticuffs are filmed with so much quick-cutting that you can't tell who's punching whom or shooting what, especially in the big alpine shootout (ripped off from about seven different Bond numbers, the opening of True Lies, Ice Station Zebra, etc.), where everyone, good and bad alike, is dressed in identical white parkas and face masks! The Matrix was dumb, but it was true to its comic-book-meets-kung-fu aesthetic and actually gave us a few full karate chops before the camera cut away, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, whose wire-based aerial combat is also ripped off, was filmed almost entirely in balletic long-shot. Well, everyone's metallic threads glint and do not wrinkle, the men wear spread collars, and Marion Cotillard wanders around wondering what she's doing here, especially as the strains of Je ne regrette rien keep rising in the ghostly background. I would take this as a quirky, metafictive joke, except this is a Christopher Nolan movie, and the rare joke sticks out like Spock at the Funnybone.

I suppose I could list the other movies and moviemakers that Nolan shamelessly rips off. The Wizard of Oz. Miyazaki. Michael Mann. Oh, why bother. Inception is dull, overlong, sexless, and unimaginative. It is a $200 million car commercial, a glossy magazine photo. You give yourself license to create whole worlds from the stuff of pure consciousness, and the best you can come up with is a corner café in Paris and the generic cityscape of Gotham City? Christopher Nolan, you are ripping off your own stupid movies! "If you die this deep, you'll end up in limbo," DiCaprio warns. Oh, let's repeat the adverb. Portentously. Pass me the pistol, brother. I'm going in.