Saturday, 14 August 2010

Encounters at the End of the Mind

By Jonathan Fisher, August 13th, 2010






When I first saw Inception a few weeks ago, I knew that for better or worse, this was the picture of the summer. I knew that well in advance of seeing it for the first time, which posed some problems. Before Inception had even been released in Australia (or, indeed, in the United States), a divide had grown in the critic community. Inception, it seems, is either the masterpiece of 21st century cinema thus far, or an overblown, over-hyped piece of garbage. If you listen to the internet (or rather, "the internetz" -- there is a distinction), there is no middle ground.


When I first saw Inception, my first instinct was to love it. I kind of knew that I would, and that's just the problem. Cinema does not exist in a vacuum, as many critics claim. When one walks into a movie, one brings all the baggage that comes with being a film fan, or a casual moviegoer. I walked into Inception knowing that Christopher Nolan is a man I admire very much. When I was about 15, his film Memento was one the films that first caused me to think of movies critically. I adore, despite what some critics vehemently argue, the direction that he has taken the Batman films. On the flip side, I'm sure that Jim Emerson walked into Inception fully aware that his aversion to The Dark Knight made it more likely that he would cast an unforgiving, some might say pedantic (I would) eye over Nolan's latest offering.

Positive and negative bias is a part of being human, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous and insults readers' intelligence. Good critics acknowledge that, while other critics pretend to be 'objective' and 'fair-minded'. Good critics also are open to having their expectations overturned (for instance, who'd have thought that Colin Farrell would give the performance he delivered in the 2008 masterpiece In Bruges?).

That open-mindedness should go both ways. As my readers will be aware, I'm not sure about the existence of God, but Martin Scorsese is, in a way, my deity, and his films my sacrament. Does that mean I went into Shutter Island expecting to love it? Unfortunately, it does. But I admit that, and you can make of my comments of his films what you will.

This article was supposed to, in part, be a review of Inception, but I feel that enough has been written about that movie. I don't have much new to add that you couldn't read in a variety of sources (good articles, both for and against Inception, are listed below). I will say that it is probably not the masterpiece that the Internetz claims it to be. Nolan delivers a brilliantly choreographed gimmick, but I was disappointed. The most interesting character in the movie was Cillian Murphy's, but he was neither a pro- nor antagonist. He was a pawn, lacking any control of his own destiny, while believing his catharsis was self-motivated.

On the plus side, the multi-layered (dream layers, that is) zero gravity fight scene is as good a piece of stand-alone film-making as I've seen in a while. Hans Zimmer's soundtrack is both beautiful and beautifully nuanced (did anyone else notice how the recurring Piaf song slowed down depending on what layer of dream we were in?), and Nolan's production values -- including the performances of all his principals -- are almost inevitably first-rate.

When it comes down to it, though, most of the characters in Inception aren't really characters. What do we really know of Dom Cobb (diCaprio), except for the fact that he is so psychologically scarred by the loss of his wife that he is willing to lead his entire team into mortal danger, all the while telling them that they are in no mortal danger? How did Saito use his corporate might to mobilise the team's mission in such a short space of time, in a world where mergers and take-overs take months to finalise? Ariadne (Ellen Page) jumps on board with Cobb's plan with absolutely no hesitation or suspicion. Again, why?

And why on Earth was the brilliantly, mercurially talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt cast in a role that requires him to do little more than float around and push buttons? (Incidentally, I have a feeling that Gordon-Levitt's role was initially intended for the late Heath Ledger, which added an unintended layer of pathos to Inception for me)

I will say, though, that Nolan ends Inception on a more poignant and thrilling note than he did The Dark Knight, The Prestige and even Memento. If there is one image that stays with me, nearly a month after seeing Inception, it's that spinning top, wobbling slightly on its axis, determining Cobb's (and our) fate. Does that wobble resolve all those pesky questions about Inception's true reality (if it exists at all... I have a theory that the first layer of the film, the 'real' layer, is actually the limbo that Cobb so fears)? It might, it might not. Despite Inception's flaws, I still cared. Cobb may have been a border-line sociopath determined to seek his own agenda with complete disregard to his team's safety, but he was my sociopath.






Some Inception Articles Worth Reading:


David Bordwell, davidbordwell.net

David Edelstein, NY Mag


Jim Emerson, scanners

Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com


Stephanie Zacharek, movieline.com

"Duck Tales" cartoon strip from 2003: Was Christopher Nolan a victim of Inception himself?





Inception trailer:
Posted by Jonathan Fisher at 11:31

5 comments:

  1. Great write up Jon but I was one of the captivated many. I certainly believe it was this generation's Blade Runner or Metropolis. A cinema defining film. I didn't have any of the issues with it you did at all. I just loved it. :)
    ReplyDelete
  2. As defining as METROPOLIS? Come now, Jen... Let's see if, in even 30 years, INCEPTION is discussed, pondered and appreciated as regularly and thoroughly as Lang's movie.

    I said I loved it, didn't I! Maybe I should have made that a little clearer at the end of my review. I agree with Bordwell's conclusion that even if INCEPTION doesn't deliver fully-rounded characters, it's a brilliant puzzle movie and as fun an exercise in non-linear narrative as Nolan's produced.
    ReplyDelete
  3. I only partially agree, I'm afraid. No, movies do not exist in a vacuum. Of course they don't. On that foundation we agree. But what we're really calling into question here is not the critic's perspective or nature of preference, but the critic's function - its purpose.

    I posit a common outline for the purpose of the film critic, the one I abide by personally - The function of the critic is to facilitate and engage a discussion about a film that leads to a deeper understanding of and appreciation for said film. This has little to do with a critic's assertion that a film is "good" or "bad". That is an afterthought, an effect only earned by a well-articulated cause. If we prefer one critic to another on the sole basis that we agree with their personal opinion then we are engaging neither with the film nor with the critic, and if the critic makes a claim about a films quality without properly explaining that position than that critic is assuming an unearned dominion over the opinions of his or her readers.

    We must go now to an observation by none other than Jim Emerson himself, that no meaningful or productive discussion can be possible unless it begins on a foundation of mutually verifiable and observable facts. You might accuse Mr. Emerson of dismissing "Inception" on the basis of preconceived negative bias, but if you are going to disprove his assertion of the film's "quality" (i.e. his opinion of whether the film was "good" or "bad"), you must disprove his reasons for saying so, which, through strong prose and articulate rhetoric, can be difficult, because his "opinion" was founded on verifiable observations that he clearly explained. If those observations are accurate, than you must engage next with his response to them, and by this point Mr. Emerson has already proven his worth as a critic by facilitating an intelligent discussion about "Inception" that may lead to greater understanding and appreciation of it, regardless of our own preferences. Appreciation is the direct result of understanding, now matter how bad the film. So. "Pedantic"? There was a time, Jon, when I would have agreed with you.

    My review: Do you disagree?
    http://www.ghostonscreen.com/2010/07/geometry-of-grey-matter.html
    ReplyDelete
  4. I didn't intend this article to be a critique of Emerson's opinion of INCEPTION, and he's written far too much on it for me to counter every point he makes right now (he has the leisure of writing full-time for a living), but I will say that one of my main issue's with his initial article on the film (http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2010/07/inception_has_christopher_nola.html) is that he's criticising the movie for not replicating how HE would make a dreamscape film. He says:

    "It's all so neatly organized! In other words, not dreamlike at all. Just disappointingly flat, sterile, cold, rational."

    For one thing, there is nothing rational about the dreamscapes in INCEPTION. If there were, there would be no trains appearing from thin air, no Escher stair-case metamorphoses, and Eames would not be able to shape-shift at will (the mechanics of which were never really explained). Much like Cobb's summation of the dream experience -- "it's only when you wake up that you notice something was strange" -- the dreamscapes in INCEPTION deteriorate with close inspection. A film like WHAT DREAMS MAY COME may better reflect what Emerson expects from a dreamscape movie, but that wasn't what Nolan was going for.
    ReplyDelete
  5. Alas, I didn't intend my comment to be critique of it either. My boo. But I do still hold true to my belief that a critic is only worth its salt if it engages with verifiable components of a film. And that, of course, it is perfectly acceptable to have preconceived notions of a film, so long as we gauge how those notions interacted with what we actually saw.

    That said, I do still agree with Emerson that the dreams were too rational for me to respond to them AS dreams and not as something more akin to mere virtual reality, ala "The Matrix" (upon further inspection, "Flat", "sterile", and "cold" were all terms I used in my own review). My main problem, as was Emerson's, was the linearness (is that a word?) of time. To quote him again, "once something happens, it stays happened..." That is true. That is observable. And I think that is a major oversight within the realm of the dreamscape.

    Personally, I think an architectural labyrinth in the space-time continuum would be far more intriguing than city streets (which do not tangibly change at any time during the climax, save for an arbitrary train, leaving me to wonder what the point was of showing us such awe-inspiring spectacle at the halfway point if it is not going to be returned to). It would also, however, be far more difficult, which would make it, ultimately, far more admirable. But that's just whimsical thinking.

    I must admit, I had prepared myself to love "Inception" before I saw it as well. I had to willfully step down off my pedestal to engage with problems I at first wanted to dismiss. So I'm in the same boat as you are, Jon. I just wanted to clarify a point. Liking or disliking a film is the least important part of a review.
    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)