Inception

I caught Inception on an IMAX screen last week and it’s the best movie I’ve seen this year. I’ve watched a lot of films so far – an unseemly amount. I keep a list on a legal pad and it’s over 70 right now. Most of them were released in past years so it’s difficult to comprehensively state that Inception is the finest film released this year but maybe we should set aside the bests and the comparisons and just say it’s fantastic. It’s a wonderfully entertaining film that begs to be watched on a big screen. It’s an essential example of why we pay inflated prices for a couple hours of mindless escapism. I hesitate to say it’s brilliant but it’s certainly in the upper tier of that wonderful segment of film-making that targets pure enjoyment and breathless entertainment over, say, technical aptitude or serious plotting and character development.

I’ve read some reviews that criticize the film for its lack of character development and a plot that almost denies any attempt at emotional investiture. I can’t disagree with such an assessment but it’s besides the point. I don’t know the intentions of the director or much care but there seems to be a belief that just because the premise of the film uses some seemingly innovative concepts – the ability to construct dreams for other people – it should transcend the action-adventure film into something Charlie Kaufman might write. That’s baloney. It’s a film where the premise heightens the action and the enjoyment rather than dominates it. It’s a concept that Christopher Nolan has played with before – both Memento and The Prestige have uncommon structures that add to the entertainment but don’t try to masturbate over how uncommon they really are. You might call it pseudo-deep – a sort of concept wherein the film elevates a common action-adventure romp into a more sophisticated spectacle that falls purposely far short of Bergman or Fellini. After all, it’s meant as entertainment for the masses.

In the past 15 years, many of my favorite action movies have disregarded or poorly developed their characters or plot. The Matrix, the Bourne films, Mission:Impossible, Goldeneye, Casino Royale, etc. These are action films. It’s escapism. I’ve argued before and I’ll argue again that the purest and greatest form of film is the action movie – it allows us to experience the impossible and the amazing and really no other artistic format allows for that in such an immersive manner. Inception is in the same vein. I don’t know how it will stack up on rewatching. I’m not even sure if I’d call it mind-blowing. I think the last film to reach mind-blowing status was the Matrix, which was completely revolutionary, or perhaps the Lord of the Rings trilogy (honestly, does anyone think Avatar did anything technically that surpassed what Peter Jackson and crew did 5+ years ago?). But, who cares, it’s an intricately built, popcorn-shoveling adventure of a movie.

I can’t help but compare it to another film I viewed recently: Synecdoche, New York. This is the film that Roger Ebert named his best of the decade and the reason I name-checked Charlie Kaufman earlier (he wrote and directed the film). The reason I can’t help but compare is that both in a way deal with mind-fucks. In Inception, Nolan serves many scenes in a way that you’re not really certain what’s reality and what’s a dream. In Synecdoche, as the film goes on, what’s real and what’s staged in a play begin to muddle together as time contracts and characters multiply. What was a promising concept devolves into a confusing soup of people who never really get developed. The film centers around Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character but even all the clever allusions to diseases of the mind can’t hide the fact that his character never progresses beyond a one-note, one-dimensional walking advertisement for melancholy and loneliness. The difference between the two films is that Inception’s success doesn’t ride on the audience’s emotional attachment with a character – Synecdoche depends on it and ultimately fails. Inception is an action movie at heart and should be judged on its merits as such – and a terrific action movie it is.