When Alfred Hitchcock directed Vertigo in 1958, he and his cameramen invented a new camera move, tracking back with the camera while zooming in, to capture Jimmy Stewart's acrophobia. The Vertigo effect was the wonder of its day. In many ways, Christopher Nolan's summer film Inception shares the bitter romance and disorientation of Hitchcock's movie. But special effects have advanced greatly in the last fifty years, and Nolan takes full advantage of twisting, turning CGI-scapes that would tickle M.C. Escher.
Though not as profilic, Nolan has proven himself to be a sort of modern Hitchcockian. From The Dark Knight and The Prestige to his best work, Memento, Nolan has played the showman with tricks up his sleeve, who gleefully manipulates the audience then reminds us it's just a movie. The wonder of Vertigo is that it uses the same tricks as Hitchcock's usual crowdpleasers but sinks deeper as it unfolds. Nolan goes the opposite route with Inception, trying to force profundity upon a fun popcorn flick.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a single father in exile, gifted at extracting information from entering people's dreams. He is called upon by a Japanese industrialist to enter his competitor's dreams not to remove an idea but to add one, a process known as inception. Within the running of the film, though, the rationale behind this entry into dreams becomes the MacGuffin, glossed over in the sea of exposition that makes up the first hour. Nolan's rules for inception are complex, and slogging through them at first feels turgid because the script doesn't allow its characters to breathe. Nor does Hans Zimmer's oppressive score, which overstates with crashing timpani and wailing brass.
Marion Cotillard is his secret weapon. She looks ravishing as Cobb's deceased wife, whom he recalls by revisiting his memory-box of dreams, and ironically feels the most flesh-and-blood of the cast. Everyone else is subservient to Nolan's mind games except for Cotillard. Her eyes, cruel and agonizingly sad, are something out of a nightmare. In a movie of dazzling plot twists and shifting city streets, her performance is the stuff dreams are made of.
1 comment:
I think Nolan is one of the only directors working today who is ambitious enough to make a psychological thriller (which is what I believe Inception is) that is also a "popcorn flick," as you say. I think he's managed to marry the two together almost seamlessly in Inception (though, really, he handles this better with The Dark Knight), but I understand the discord you and others have asserted.
For me, the film is first a drama that explores its main character's grief and instability (which is why so many compare the story to DiCaprio's other 2010 film, Shutter Island). Second, it's an action thriller. All the effects—the dreams, the spinning (or toppling?) totem in the last shot—are a way of getting at his internal struggle.
That being said, Cotillard blew everyone else out of the water.
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