Inception

Set for a November 2010 release, Terrence Malick’s long gestating The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, is our pick for the year’s big Oscar film. The details of the production have been kept as secret as any major production ever, word slipping here and there that the film is the product of nearly three decades of writing by Malick. The production is said to be huge and the post-production as labored-over as any. All that said, we at ScreenTime refuse to believe that Tree’s production will match that of the just released new Christopher Nolan film, Inception, surely another big Oscar film. 

Where to begin? Inception, Nolan’s seventh proper feature, is the British-American auteur’s biggest, strangest, most promoted, most anticipated and most memorable work yet. Opening this past weekend at No. 1 with over $60 million in US sales, I left the theater wondering three things about the dreamy heist flick: 1) how many people in the theater with me were able to follow not just the bombastic action, but the delicate storyline?; 2)  How the f%#@ do you write something like that?; and 3) which of ScreenTime’s favorite directors saw this film? Malick? Tarantino? Scorcese? Spielberg?! What did they think of it? This, I’d love to know.

I wasn’t alive when Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, but I can still watch it today and feel its power and originality, every time wondering how it made Kubrick’s contemporaries feel. My guess is that it made them all realize that they needed to think harder and work harder. Even if your name is Spielberg and you made an epic production called Saving Private Ryan, Inception likely has a similar 2001 effect on you. More than Star Wars in 1977 or Avatar just last year, Inception just feels bigger, grander, more labored over and “next level” than anything of recent memory. Films likes Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Tarantino’s original Kill Bill cut, Nolan’s own The Dark Knight and even Malick’s own The Thin Red Line are humbled by the mastery and creativity of Inception.

That said, Inception is not the best film of 2010. Not in our book. It may be the best made film of 2010, but a better film, Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophete, has already been released and there are a couple coming yet (Tree, mostly), that stand to be better. After such a rant about the brilliance of Inception, how can I already say such a thing? Well, many reasons. For starters, Inception is an often tedious film. Using a chopped-up non-linear storytelling device, Nolan has made an extraordinarily cerebral caper film that’s dressed up as a big summer blockbuster. There’s enough action to make Sly Stallone blush, which is cool, but there’s also an awful lot of important dialogue. You have to hear every word in the film so much so that, in fact, if you simply sneeze at the wrong parts of the film, you’ll miss something that could maybe spoil your complete understanding of what’s going on. (Tedious is the word I keep coming back to, even if I’m uncomfortable using such a negative word to describe such a masterful work.) If you’ve not yet seen the movie, imagine sitting in a theater for 150 minutes, paying close attention to every word and movement, never more than a 10 second break for a joke or two. Plan to walk out of the theater with a fried brain, dropped jaw and crossed eyes.

But hey, let’s not knock an artist for being wildly ambitious. We’re cool with Inception frying our brain. And, aside from that, we have very few issues with the movie. Sure, the setup (basically, these dudes gotta crack into this younger dude’s dreams and plant an idea in this his mind before he turns his dad’s company into a Wal-Mart-like monster) is incredibly underbaked compared to what follows, but that’s no big deal. And the casting, aside from Marion Cotillard (who is perfect), seems a bit off, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb seeming a bit too similarly played to his recent Shutter Island character, Teddy Daniels. The still-very-young-feeling Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the mature daddy of the operation? And Ellen Page as the big brain who makes things happen? Ummm.

Now let’s focus on the good things. First and foremost is the writing, which is brilliant. People who write as well as Nolan usually write long, details novels - and Inception could’ve easily been a mini-series. But Nolan thinks equally in movement and vision, and we’re the luckier for it. His writing, especially in Memento, The Prestige and The Dark Knight, has always been impressive, but here he makes his mark. The amount of detail and thought put into this puzzle of a story is mind-blowing. Look for Nolan to grab an Oscar nomination - and maybe statue - for his original screenplay. No. 2 on the list of things Inception does impossibly well is editing. You have to see it twice to believe it. Telling a story like this on paper is hard enough, but taking moving pictures of it, adding sound and music and CGI, then cutting it all up non-linear-style and making sense of it is the hardest part of the process.  Editor Lee Smith, known mostly for his work with Peter Weir, will win 2010’s Oscar for Best Editing. He should’ve won it in 2008 for The Dark Knight, in 2006 for The Prestige and maybe even in 2005 for Batman Begins, but he will win it in 2010.

There’s much more to say about the tedious but brilliant, visually inventive yet action-packed new Christopher Nolan movie, but let’s not get carried away. It’s just a movie. It’s just the movie that deserves all of the attention Avatar received last year but won’t (this because it makes you think too hard). It’s just the movie that (fingers crossed) might change the way Hollywood studios treat big brain artists with big ideas. For a while, anyhow. And we have Christopher Nolan and his brilliant new sci-fi mindbender to thank.    10/10

Written by G. William Locke