Inception

As Duke Vincentio tells Claudio in Measure for Measure: “Thou hast nor youth nor age/ But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep/ Dreaming on both.” Sleep and dreaming is a perennial subject of artistic and scientific speculation and Christopher Nolan adds to the mumbo jumbo in Inception. Cinema and dreaming are so inextricably linked that it is easy, especially with digital technology, to create an elaborate labyrinth of the mind that passes as philosophical rumination.

Inception is a clever bag of tricks that keeps you occupied with its spiel on the ‘architecture’ of dreams and the layers of subconscious that surround us when we sleep. But ultimately, when the film turns out to be a thriller about stealing ideas of people while they dream and influencing them to turn those ideas into corporate benefit for vested interests, Nolan’s metamorphosis from pretentious philosopher to Hollywood peddler is complete.

In the virtual world of our entertainment, we are suckers for this kind of nonsense, and the movie takes us on a trip that is hallucinogenic in its inverted images, reversal of time and spatial orientation. By playing with the opaqueness of sequence and space in all dreaming, Nolan creates a network that is very similar to the maze used for laboratory rats in experiments. We, the audience, are the rats trying to find a way out of it and just as completely possessed by the experience.

Inception doesn’t appear to be set in the future, yet Cobb (DiCaprio) seems to mysteriously possess knowhow that can enter the dream space of Fischer (Cillian Murphy), heir to his father’s business, and psyche him into breaking the financial empire he will inherit. The same psychobabble gets Cobb in touch with his late wife (Cotillard) and lets him blur dreams with fragments of memory. 

Particularly with the fragmentary memories of the wife,  DiCaprio’s agitated role seems a spillover from Scorsese’s Shutter Island. Is this excellent actor repeating the persona he invents?