How to Improve ‘Inception’: Some Enthusiastic Ideas From CC2K
Written by: The CinCitizens
Lance Carmichael:
I think that the last major thing we talked about at our emergency summit and haven’t hit on yet—besides Nolan’s inability to shoot a coherent action scene—is how the way the plot shook out left us…unsatisfied. This is a movie about (essentially) professional con men, set in the world of dreams, where the ability to distinguish between what is the real and what is dream–whether it be the world itself or the person you think is your godfather–is up for grabs. They set out to jack into Cillian Murphy’s mind while he was sleeping on an airplane and plant an idea…and that’s exactly what happened. I kept waiting for the rug to get pulled out, to learn that Cillian Murphy had in fact set this all up, that the airplane was actually a dream, Ken Watanabe was working for the Cillian Murphy, and so was JGL, and Leo was the Mark all along. Or something like that.
And it never happened.
This is disappointing not only because it would have made for a more satisfying movie, but because that is the very thing that Christopher Nolan is GOOD AT. Not just good: exceptional. Memento is one of the great “Is this person conning me?” movies of all time. The Prestige ain’t too shabby at misdirection and sudden turns, either. I thought that the whole four-dream-worlds thing was just the SET UP to the real movie once a turn happened at the end of the second act. As the incomprehensible snow fortress dream dragged on and I got the sinking feeling that this was IT, I purposely didn’t look at my watch, hoping against hope that my internal sensors telling me the movie was about to wrap up were wrong.
We had forgers, shady corporate people with double motives, hinted-at governmental agencies and enemy corporations gunning for our hero…and everyone was exactly who they said they were. Boo!
I also noticed none of us have said ONE WORD about the Marion Cotillard character and storyline. I’m gonna hazard a guess that it’s not because we both thought it was a timeless, for-the-books love story that has immediately been vaulted into the ranks of cinema’s all-time-best. I’m going to actually guess neither of us have mentioned it because it was so…so…
Bleh.
Guy Pearce’s raped and murdered wife in Memento. Hugh Jackman’s girlie in The Prestige, accidentally killed by Christian Bale. Bruce Wayne’s parents. Batman AND Harvey Dent reeling from the death of Rachel Dawes. What do they all have in common? Yes, they’re all the dead significant others (or, in the case of Batman Begins, parents) of Tortured Christopher Nolan Protagonists. But they’re also all characters who either died BEFORE the movie started, or almost right after it began. Either way, long before I as an audience member had any time to form any emotional connection that would help me sympathize with the bereaved protagonist and thirst for vengeance to be his (I haven’t seen Insomnia, but its Netflix description suggests that Al Pacino accidentally shoots his partner and has his psyche appropriately tortured to Nolan’s specifications—can anyone chime in here?).
Now this is clearly a theme that deeply connects with Christopher Nolan. Or it’s an easy shortcut to setting up a “complicated” protagonist. Either way, it’s getting stale. I had no investment in Cotillard because we never met her when she was alive. Or maybe it’s because of her porcelain-doll perfect looks, or how she always looks like she just stepped out of hair/makeup in this movie, or how the images Leo remembers her from are straight from the Stock Familial Happiness Flashback Company. As Steven Boone puts it in his Inception review:
“Cobb’s memories of his lost love and shattered family are the kind of stock images you find in a brand new wallet: pretty wife strolling a sunny beach; adorable kids frolicking in a backyard, hair backlit with a Miller Time glow.”
Now, I’m getting a little harsh on Nolan here, so I’m going to back off (he’s very sensitive…he’s curled up on my couch right now, his back to the room). I really like Cotillard’s central problem. She could no longer distinguish between reality and dream, and since the only way they know to voluntarily wake yourself out of a dream is to actually kill yourself, she kept urging her husband to kill himself “for the kids,” and eventually demapped herself by jumping out of a building (though I’m still fuzzy on why DiCaprio wasn’t allowed to see his kids anymore…was he accused of killing her, somehow, or did I just miss that tidbit in the other 8 million blunt expository lines in the movie?—oops, sorry, Nolan’s shoulders are now quietly shaking…he may be crying). This is a great, crazy thing for a person to do. If Nolan was dead-set on having his protag be a tortured widower (does Nolan’s wife ever feel like he’s subconsciously trying to tell her something very disturbing?), I think a better way to handle that idea would have been to show us via a dream how Cotillard killed herself in that way—just get it out of the way and move on—and then LATER, when, in my Inception-meets- The Spanish Prisoner version Ken Watanabe is trying to convince Leo that Cillian Murphy is actually behind all this and is killing his sleeping team members in the real world one by one, and Leo’s next, and Leo needs to wake up…then LEO has to decide: is this a dream or real, and am I totally insane if I put this gun to my head and kill myself the way my wife stepped out of a window on the 87th floor?
All this points to our mutual frustration with a movie with a killer premise and the talent and money behind it to deliver…which unfortunately just fell short. And fell short because it feels like it just wasn’t developed enough. If Inception was just another crummy summer movie, who cares? Nobody spent 10,000 words trying to figure out where The A-Team went wrong. It was just because Inception did so many things right, yet fell short in the end, that it’s fascinated and bugged me the way it has. So close, and yet so far.
Any final thoughts?