In Dreams

Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan piles on the layers in Inception. Can he find his way out?

by Sam Adams

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B+ ]

Worlds within worlds within worlds. Christopher Nolan's Inception plunges us down three layers (or more) deep, into the realm of dreams and waking delusions. Memento's back-to-front structure followed the contours of a damaged mind, but here knowing whose mind — or minds — we're in at a given moment is the tricky part.

Dom Cobb (Leonard DiCaprio) infiltrates minds for a living. He uses dreams as a gateway, conducting industrial espionage in the target's subconscious. Or rather, and here's where it gets complicated, he lures his target into neutral territory, the mind of a third party whose dreams have been constructed for the occasion. The trick is to convince them to surrender the information willingly, or at least let down their guard long enough for Dom and his henchmen to slip in and out unnoticed.

They know the tricks: Hire an architect (Ellen Page) to build a world whose edges fold in on itself, so the limits of the ersatz dream won't be spotted; a chemist (Dileep Rao) who can make a sedative powerful enough to keep the dream terrain steady; a shape-shifter (Tom Hardy) who can alter his appearance in the dream state; and a guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who's just good to have around.

Trouble is, high-powered businessman Ken Watanabe doesn't want them to steal information; he wants them to leave it. He needs rival Cillian Murphy to break up his dying father's business empire, and to think he came up with the idea himself. That means constructing a dream within a dream, and another within that, planting a simple notion so deeply that by the time it flowers into action it will be indistinguishable from his own thoughts.

If this starts to sound a lot like the process of creating a film, it's surely not an accident. More than an exploration of dreams, which are always private and sealed-off, Inception's closest analogue is to the shared dream of the movies, a tantalizing fantasy whose incompleteness begs us to fill in the gaps. Dom's rule to create dreams from experience but never replicate memories too closely, lest the division between worlds start to blur, is sound advice for writers as well as spies. Unfortunately, Dom is no good at following his own advice, which is why the menacing figure of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keeps showing up, sabotaging their plans and attacking their bodies. Being killed in a dream merely means waking up, but pain can go on for aeons.

From a rain-streaked city to a luxury hotel to an Arctic redoubt, Nolan pulls us deeper in. Each level fits within the previous one, but they have their own rules, and their own sense of time: A few seconds at the top level translates to years down below. The laws of physics bend as easily as time; the movie's bravura setpiece is a zero-gravity fight in which a weightless Gordon-Levitt navigates a hotel hallway while the body of the person whose dream he's in free-falls towards a rushing river.

Nolan handles the mechanics of his Russian-doll worlds expertly, and with far more clarity than the jumbled set-tos of The Dark Knight. But it's not clear after a single viewing whether Nolan has taken his own advice and put a single, simple idea at the center of his elaborate labyrinth. A candidate surfaces late in the game, but it feels like an afterthought, and very nearly a cheat. He builds a heck of a maze, but I'm not sure he finds his way out, or if he wants to.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)