Dream a little dream

Getting dizzy?

Look, most of the big summer movies are either dumb, dumbed down or both. Inception doesn’t have to be perfect to be better than almost anything else; it really just has to be the opposite. But it’s almost perfect, embracing both creativity and imagination in an era that often seems to value neither.

In Inception’s world, a person’s dreams can be entered by an outsider, and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are extractors, thieves who steal secrets out of the minds of corporate executives for the competition. It’s heady stuff, but Nolan makes it work by implanting simple truths into our brains and touching on the all-too-familiar sensations we enjoy as we begin to dream, and when we wake up, and the strange feelings we can’t quite pinpoint but we’ve all experienced that occur when we come out of a dream that felt so real that we have to remember that we’re back in our own world and no longer skating through our subconscious.

Like dreams, Inception uses plot devices that feel oddly familiar. But though it has all the hallmarks of a heist movie, it’s actually a con-artist film, and the biggest con man of them all is Nolan himself, because you never know if what you’re seeing is the truth or something that simply resembles it.

Cobb has to pull one last big dream caper so he can return to his life and his children. That means he has to assemble a team of experts, including the dream architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), the legendary forger Eames (scene stealer Tom Hardy), the chemist Yusef (Dileep Rao) and Saito (Ken Watanabe), the businessman who commissioned the job with an offer to give Cobb his life back.

The job is this: They must implant an idea into the head of Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), a young executive who will soon control the world’s largest energy company.

Now, extraction is one thing—implantation, or inception, is something else entirely. This means kidnapping him, sedating him and entering the inner sanctum of his subconscious. But there’s a hitch, and it’s one that only Ariadne has sorted out. Cobb, you see, is a fractured man who spends far too much time dreaming, desperately clutching onto the memories of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard)—so much so that her presence in his subconscious is a liability. She can always show up out of nowhere to destroy his work. Is she real? Is she only in his subconscious? Is she dead, alive or actually awake in another reality? Or is everything we see one of Cobb’s dreams?

In Inception, Nolan plays with our grasp on reality in the same way he did in Memento, but it’s even more calibrated and calculating. It’s as if he’s pulling back the curtain on the film’s structure, unveiling the inner workings, as the intertwining gears mesh together. But it’s still amazing to see all of the dreamscape realities exist simultaneously, each built upon one another, like a psychic version of Russian tea dolls. M.C. Escher has nothing on Nolan, who’s created gorgeous imagery that is as captivating as the story itself.

Dreams, as we know, are unreliable narrators, and as Inception delves into dreams within dreams within dreams, where time exists on different planes and death means a permanent psychic limbo, it becomes reasonable to distrust what we have been presented with as a true reality.

But that’s absolutely part of Nolan’s master scheme— he doesn’t want you to trust him or his movie. He expects you to begin to question whether anything you’re seeing can be considered real or whether everything is taking place in a dream world. It’s a lot to take in, but even though it’s beautifully complex, it isn’t overly complicated, and the beginning is just as important as the end.

So, what is Inception? It’s well-made, big-budget filmmaking that is rich and complex. As movies go,

it’s the stuff that dreams are made of.

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INCEPTION

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon- Levitt and Marion Cotillard Rated PG-13 9 Goes well with: Memento, The Sting, The Matrix