It's rare that a film really motivates me to write a review...
***Please do not read this review until you've seen the film***
Often my experience with a film can be summed up by my experience with the audience I'm subjected too while watching the film. While waiting for the trailers to start, I was surrounded by cell phones, talking kids, and people MAWING their popcorn mouths agape. It was potentially the worst case scenario for me to try and suspend disbelief.
Approximately three quarters of the way through the film, there's a sudden cessation of sound, the movie had been loud, REALLY loud, then suddenly quiet. The theater was silent as well. The movie had shut the audience up, and I was left with a feeling of pure movie engagement, a supremely rare occurrence in this day and age of movie attendance.
It's rare that a film actually succeeds in the mission of cinema, namely the escape from reality. At the 12:45 showing of "Inception" Nolan succeed in this mission, and he succeeded in style. I've come to really respect Nolan as a film maker. He draws effortlessly from a variety of inspirations, and his emerging style is one I'm happy to call "bold restraint". He has an eye for the fantastic, but has yet to succumb to the trappings and tropes of lesser directors.
Take "The Dark Knight" for example. The movie opens with a painfully grounded realistic, and practical bank robbery. However, it's shot in 70mm, at once giving us something comfortable to begin an incredible film (something we're familiar with), and unsettling us with something we've never seen before. He uses an incredible amount of CG in that film, but none of it for effects, more to do things like remove cameras from being in the shot, and when it's time to flip a semi, he just flips a damn semi.
"Inception" continues in this tradition of "bold restraint". We're presented with a visual simile we're fairly familiar with by this point (entering a world of fantasy), but it's served to us in a way we haven't quite seen before.
Continued is Nolan's glorious restraint from trying to trick us into think CG is "real". Stunts and effects are painfully realistic and practical. CG is relegated to landscape photography, in my personal opinion, where I think it belongs. This is culminated in a mid movie battle in a hallway which has lost its gravity, shot straight out of the Stanley Kubrick book of tricks from "2001: A Space Odyssey".
"Bold restraint" also aids in the casting of this film, where actors are fantastically chosen for very practical reasons. Just as in "The Dark Knight", where someone might have laughed at Eric Roberts playing a mob boss, Tom Berenger makes an appearance as a small but pivotal character free from any irony. Nolan has told us that this is the right man for the job, and he is.
You don't need me to tell you that the rest of the cast is phenomenal. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is emerging as an ensemble actor of Sam Rockwell-like proportions, and even in the briefest of moments, is capable of elevating the performances of those around him.
Tom Hardy provides much needed (yet subtle) comic relief, and is a perfect focal point for the rest of the characters to explain things too, for the audiences' sake (plus if you've not yet seen "Bronson", please stop reading this and find a copy of it NOW).
Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine return from previous Nolan ventures (and rightfully so), and Ellen Page provides some refreshing youth and vibrance in the middle of a ”shades of gray” venture.
DiCaprio's performance is fairly seemless. By that I mean there's little "acting method" displayed on the screen. One has to wonder if Nolan considered using Bale at some point, whose last several films have begun to feel a bit ponderous in his approach to character. DiCaprio seems to imbue this film with a different enough energy to keep this from feeling like "The Dark Knight TWO: Electric Boogaloo". This is no small feat considering that the aforementioned visual simile of other "mind fantasy" films (like "The Matrix") is in full effect, yet I still left having had a uniquely enjoyable experience. I lay some of this success at the feet of DiCaprio.
I'm very much impressed with the performance of Marion Cotillard, not because I didn’t know she is a wonderful actress, but because I've always been told that what she accomplishes in this movie is impossible. Through acting, writing, and directing classes, I've always been told about how to create characters, and what motivates them. Cotillard is given a character not motivated by her own concerns, but the memories of another character's desires, and she succeeds brilliantly in preventing this from becoming a badly orchestrated puppet show.
I've already made much of Nolan's technical mastery, but one last examination of "bold restraint" must be discussed. This is a film that so easily could've have been handled ENTIRELY on a sound stage in southern California. With so much of this film taking place in fantasy land, it must have been very tempting to shoot the entire film on a green screen, Zack Snyder style. I'm so glad that didn't happen. Principle photography being shot in six different countries, and including some jaw droppingly beautiful camera sequences, Nolan has given us images of reality that boggle the imagination. When paired with images of the impossible, it can really leave one feeling excited, unsettled and disoriented.
Were I to levvy some complaints against the film, there is a small issue of trust regarding this concept, and its delivery to the audience. Much is made of the mechanics of this dream invasion, including some fairly in depth description of the hierarchy and relationship between the different people involved in each dream vacation. This ultimately proves to be of little consequence to the ending of the film, which as it builds momentum, has little time or energy to pay off the intricate relationships described. Some will certainly enjoy this attention to detail, but in a film lovingly described to me on Twitter as a "bladder buster", I was starting to hope for a Matrix-like head spike to get the middle of the film moving a little quicker.
Much will be made of this film's flaws (which I care not to go into any further detail here), and much will be made of this film's obvious metaphor, but as I stumbled out of the theater into afternoon day light (needing a second to get my bearings and equilibrium), I was impressed, sated, and very much looking forward to Nolan's next venture into "bold restraint".
For those of you that care to, I would recommend staying through the credits. There isn't anything after the credits, but there is a deliciously chosen musical moment ending the credit sequence. It's time to wake up...
-Juan Carlos Bagnell
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at 11:32PM ;)
Normally I would pan a movie for not deciding what it is.
