Burly Movies: INCEPTION (2010)

You'll hear a lot of people complain about how INCEPTION defies its own logic in order to have the plot plod on. Like Chris Nolan is just painting himself into a corner script-wise and has to shat out a deus ex machina to make it work.

Nothing like that really happens in the movie. You're asked to buy that a team of mind-heisters will risk their own minds and sanity and lives following their leader dude who may be leading them toward certain doom. But outside of that, nothing is contrived to the point where you can't accept it. Or at least, I did.

It's easy to read a description of INCEPTION and kind of know what you're getting. Too many are probably weighing the movie down with MATRIX-like depth it doesn't have, which THE MATRIX didn't have either. What it does have is a sterling conceit told in the most general way possible. The world of INCEPTION is a world in which technology has become emblematic instead of specific. We don't need to know how a machine that fits into a suitcase enables other human beings to enter consciousnesses that are not theirs. It's just not important, just as it's never been important with any important science fiction that has come along. And when I say "important SF", I am not talking about "Star Trek" and STAR WARS.

In movie terms, INCEPTION belongs in interesting times for sure. It's a 1960's SF movie made today. In fact, this is a "mission movie", where all the characters have a mission and must overcome every obstacle to its success. In science fiction terms, FANTASTIC VOYAGE and "Mission: Impossible" are key here. "Mission: Impossible" is pretty much the core plot structure of the movie: leader (DiCaprio) is introduced, the team is assembled, the mission is go, the audience is held suspended not by the crucial life/death dynamics nor whether the team will pull it off, but how they will pull it off.

This is not to say the stakes are not high, but they are most at their epicenter when DiCaprio as "Cobb" is forced to confront what is certainly the deterioration in his own mind. The mission is compromised by this insecurity, which the audience is privvy to early on. I've heard criticisms of DiCaprio's performance, but I'll say he's transformed himself into a Burly Man. It's official. He knows what he's doing, he knows the power of how he moves and how his words are spoken. He's a consummate male presence, an identifier, proven here and in SHUTTER ISLAND. Kudos to DiCaprio.

Everyone in the movie is dynamic without obvious cliches. As you can also read elsewhere, Jason Gordon-Levitt is a blossoming stud who owns this movie with its most incredible sequences, particularly the "anti-gravity hotel." Gordon "Don't Hate Me for Being a F*cking Stud"-Levitt is a strong, personable character within his own skin. He doesn't reach out to the audience, he lets them come to him. He seems like background fodder and yet this and BRICK, the "high-school Hammett" movie, reveal this guy's intense attention to great acting: he knows how to move, how to present thought without speaking. Great work by him, and a dude I will hopefully be enjoying for decades to come.

It also has little Ellen Page. She must taste like a dreamsicle, which is one of the two or three greatest things the Lord ever gave us.

INCEPTION is the best movie of this year, easily. Chris Nolan, the writer/director of MEMENTO, THE PRESTIGE and a couple of superhero movies, and now this thing, is producing good work time after time, undeniably. He's probably an insufferable arteest type, far as I know, but you can't argue with the effect of his movies. It's getting to the point where a Nolan movie is guaranteed to be interesting and arresting, as great movies should, just as M. Night's movies are guaranteed to stink on ice. Nolan can start chalking up a filmography right up there with some of the best. Even a second movie with a guy dressed in a Bat-dildo suit hasn't derailed him with its success. I think Nolan deserves some credit for not making a couple of arty movies and a couple of Bat-dildo movies, then spending the rest of his time on Earth snorting coke off some Hollywood skank's mons pubis. I'm sure he does some of that, but somewhere in there he does the work and we get INCEPTION. Which is fantastic for us.