Inception
(Note: I'm starting this with a spoiler-free discussion; possible spoilers for Inception, The Prestige and The Dark Knight may appear in the comments.)
Christopher Nolan is rapidly turning into one of those directors that I admire, but don't and can't love - primarily because I don't and seemingly can't get into his lead characters, and often find myself not even liking his side characters.
Take Prestige where absolutely everyone, with the possible exception of the little girl, was deeply, terribly unlikeable. (And I didn't even like her either, but she at least wasn't as blatantly amoral and cruel and just, well, uncharismatic as everyone else.) This even included Michael Caine, dropping his usual, "Hi. I'm Michael Caine, your trustworthy font of wisdom for this film" role (although he's since picked that back up in other Christopher Nolan films, including Inception.) It made it terribly, terribly difficult for me to care overmuch about the plot when I was spending my time rather hoping that both leads, and their romantic interests, and their various mentors, would all get blown up in a magic trick. (This is all apart from the "oh give me a break" of the last few seconds.) Well. I did like the little birds, but you know, THEY WERE THE ONES GETTING KILLED in the magic trick, which, sniffle. It goes far further than not having anyone to identify with onscreen - I can live with that (see, Northanger Abbey); if I don't like anyone in the film enough to care if they survive, I'm not going to get into it. I admired the film and the first part of the ending (not the last few seconds), but I couldn't like the film, or even enjoy it very much. Whereas I immediately fell in love with the equally if not considerably more implausible magician film that came out at about the same time, The Illusionist, since that offered me a fairly likeable female lead and an entirely likeable, thoroughly sympathetic supporting character in Paul Giamatti's police inspector, to accompany a rather mysterious, but, you know, generally sympathetic character for the male lead. Sure, I can quibble about it (a lot of it) but, I wanted the inspector to figure things out, so I was involved. There. Into the film.
I felt the almost the same way about Batman Begins, although I certainly didn't hate the characters as much. Liked the great starting plot (ludicrous and irritating ending plot), liked the action sequences (HOWEVER RIDICULOUS THE END SETUP) couldn't get into any of the characters (although to be fair part of this was sheer irritation at Katie Holmes which probably no director could have overcome). Almost, because, well, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine gave me someone to like, and Christian Bale was almost likeable. Sometimes. Maybe. Plus, you know, he's Batman, so, coolness factor. So, ok film.
But the only Christopher Nolan film I've been able to admire AND like has been The Dark Knight, which did include three (gasp, three!) likeable characters (Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and whoever was playing Commissioner Gordon), one generally sympathetic character (Harvey Dent) and one utterly compelling, compulsively watchable character - Heath Ledger's Joker. And in this film, the greyness and questionable morals of the lead character worked, because the film was actively questioning this greyness, these issues. (Those of you who have seen Inception and The Prestige can probably guess where I'm going with this.) But still. Three characters that I could cheer for, that I worried over, and four that I wanted to know the fates of.
But otherwise, I'm left chilled by Christopher Nolan films - and their characters.
And I don't think it's the actors, either. Admittedly, I'm drawing a blank on coming up with any characters that Christian Bale has played that I've liked…hmm….hmmm…..(pause to check IMDB) Oh right! Loved the poor kid in Henry V, and he at least started out likeable in Little Women. So he can play likeable, but in his grown-up career, he's tended to focus on playing unsympathetic dudes who are fundamentally jerks (yes, this is includes Bruce Wayne). But Hugh Jackman can be absolutely charming, compelling and likeable, even when given a absolutely crappy script, as can David Bowie, as can Leonardo DiCaprio (at times), as can Cillian Murphy when playing in anything other than a Christopher Nolan film. So I have to go with the explanation that it's not the actors, it's Christopher Nolan - quite possibly ordering them to turn the charm off.
So, Inception.
Just as with The Prestige, we have another intellectually engaging, emotionally uninteresting, and potentially repelling, film, and yet another unsympathetic and unlikeable lead. (The "reveal" at the end does not help.) The film does a little better than The Prestige in some respects, in that Michael Caine is back to being likeable and genial again, yay, and Tom Hardy gives us an immediately likeable and charming scoundrel of a forger. (Inexplicably, Ellen Page is not hooked up with him.) And….that pretty much ends the list of likeable characters (although Ellen Page tries hard, and also tries to add a certain moral voice to a film that is not, for the most part, particularly interested in morality.) Everybody else is blah or unlikeable. Pete Postelwaite is blah and unlikeable. And since Michael Caine and Tom Hardy are not in the film much (they're about third rate supporting characters) it's not enough to draw us in emotionally to the film. And alas, nobody (not even Pete Postelwaite!) but nobody gives us the riveting, utterly compelling of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. We are not just stuck for characters we care about, we are stuck (except for Tom Hardy) for characters who are interesting to watch.
So, you ask, what about the plot? The ideas?
As you've probably heard by now, Inception deals with a group of thieves who can walk into the dreams of others and steal things - specifically, ideas, secrets and the like. I have sometimes been shocked by a sudden detail in a dream showing me that my subconscious has been paying more attention than I have to certain matters, so I can buy this, although I would have thought that at least some effort would need to into interpreting a dream to understand the secret, but, whatever. Let us not dwell on the psychological issues of this. Anyway, to steal ideas, the thieves kidnap their targets, including the always tough Ken Watanabe, put them under sedation, and then go dream hopping through surprisingly sensible and realistic looking dreams, presumably to save on production costs, if later somewhat waved away by the idea that the kidnap victims/targets are actually in carefully constructed dreams made by dream architects (talk about, seriously, my dream career) and presumably the thieves are looking for a relatively comfortable, physically reassuring environment to do all their thieving in, which makes some of their later decisions improbable, but, I digress. (One scene does suggest the intriguing possibility of manufacturing dreams with impossible landscapes, but this sadly ends up leading nowhere.)
This is all fascinating, marvelous, twisted. So, what exactly are these dream stealers going to be using this amazingly advanced kidnapping/dream theft/building technology to do? 1) Steal some engineering plans, for some unknown and never explained reason (why they don't just hire the Leverage team to go steal the plans, I do not know) and 2) try to convince this billionaire billionaire dude that he should break up his company. Why? Well, somebody briefly mentions, you know, energy monopolies and the like, but he's not exactly a trustworthy source, and the point is completely dropped. Oh, and yeah, Leo, who, and this is important, we don't like, trust, or care about much, wants to go see his kid again, so, um, on with the billionaire kidnapping.
Look, dudes. Let me be blunt. If you have the resources to break down the private jet of the world's wealthiest man (implied) (who almost certainly has more than one private jet anyway, and certainly wouldn't have an issue paying for a private charter flight), you have the resources to find a simpler way to either kidnap him for ten hours someplace else, or, alternatively, break up his company some other way. This has got to be the hands down worst method of breaking up a corporate monopoly, ever. And it threw me out of the film, because, well, I couldn't care. Nobody convinced me that breaking up this corporate monopoly was important.
Now, as it happened, I left the film convinced that the entire thing was just a dream - and I am including the "realistic" parts, because, after all, even in those parts, people kept arriving in places with no explanation of how they got there, they were, just the way the dream architects said the dreams were supposed to feel. That, combined with the sheer ridiculous of the plot and a few other matters, had me convinced midway through that it was all just a dream, probably one planted by his wife (I thought this because it was her top and that explained why she kept coming in and out), and that his final resolution to abandon her in the deep dream was an inception planted by her, or by someone else wanting him to move on, to accept that she had moved on, however she had moved on. And that part of the inception involved the thought that once everything was right, once he was back with his children, the top would spin….that, or he was incepted that the top would not stop spinning in a real dream, and he knew enough of dreams to know that he was in one, and his subconscious would not allow the top to stop spinning.
(I didn't see the top wobble in the final shot, as some people are claiming, but I was already going with yeah, this is just another dream within a dream, because who the hell clears up customs that fast - once again, if you have the ability to interfere with U.S. Customs like that, you do not need to kidnap billionaires and mess up their dreams to break up their corporations, plus, the camera work at the end, the way everyone nodded and acknowledged and didn't acknowledge him, the way Michael Caine was suddenly back in Los Angeles even though he'd been in Paris….(yes, there was some throwaway line about Michael Caine bringing presents to the kids, but…whatever)…dream.)
(It's also fair to say that my brother, who saw the film with me, missed all of this, and when I explained my "all a dream" theory, said, "huh." He didn't like the film.)
But, in a dream where you have to do things, you understand that doing these things are critically important - even if you cannot possibly understand or explain why they are important. They may not, as this "break up an international supermonopoly by convincing a guy that his daddy really loves him" make any sense. But they feel compelling, urgent, critical.
The film never gives us this feeling. The closest we get is Ken Watanabe telling us that now is the best time to kidnap this dude on this first class flight, and, so, time to go, and so everyone goes, acting normally. While I'm relieved that the film avoided the cliché of "we're all walking/moving slowly because, dream!" given that in my experience, I don't, and while, yes, I've had banal moments in dreams myself, this is just…realistic. Solid. Not exciting.
After the kidnapping, the action vamps up again, although I have to question: why bother to bring in an architect if she's just going to rip off James Bond films, but, and this is key, this is also when people started having serious problems following what was going on, either because, well, it was all a dream, even the supposed realistic part (as Leo's wife suggests - what with all the dreamlike corporate espionage and everyone chasing him and being unable to get home again) so it doesn't have to make sense, or because they couldn't bring themselves to care. By this time, we've learned that Leo probably had something to do with the death of his wife and abandoned his kids; Ellen Page is perfectly happy to yell at him, but never question the morality of entering someone else's dreams and playing with his thoughts (not to mention the sheer danger of planting thoughts into the brain of such a powerful person -what if they were the wrong thoughts), the drug guy has cheerfully admitted to creating illegal drugs and trapping people in a place where they can no longer distinguish reality from dream, the billionaires are, well, mostly boring, but, probably evil because of the whole monopoly thing, the whatever guy (who at least gets a cool scene in zero grav) had had almost nothing to do and thus not gained much of a personality, which leaves us identifying with and cheering on….the forger, who is about to switch into other bodies giving us really nothing to identify with. Why should we care? I watched how it all played out, intrigued…but never caring.
But here's the larger issue. Yes, Ellen Page does confront Leo about his habit of bringing his dead wife into these constructed dreams, and everyone rightfully gets ticked when they discover that a death in the dream means getting caught in dreamlands for years and coming out with brain mush. But no one confronts the basic morality of kidnapping people to enter their dreams to begin with. This would be less frustrating if the film didn't take itself so seriously, if it was the caper film it halfway wants to be.
But it doesn't, so, that leaves us without anybody really thinking about what they're doing (more argument for "it was all a dream") - an intellectually intriguing film, if one with no emotional depth.
Intriguing enough to blog about at length, though. But I find I get the most frustrated with films that could have, should have, been great…but weren't.
Christopher Nolan is rapidly turning into one of those directors that I admire, but don't and can't love - primarily because I don't and seemingly can't get into his lead characters, and often find myself not even liking his side characters.
Take Prestige where absolutely everyone, with the possible exception of the little girl, was deeply, terribly unlikeable. (And I didn't even like her either, but she at least wasn't as blatantly amoral and cruel and just, well, uncharismatic as everyone else.) This even included Michael Caine, dropping his usual, "Hi. I'm Michael Caine, your trustworthy font of wisdom for this film" role (although he's since picked that back up in other Christopher Nolan films, including Inception.) It made it terribly, terribly difficult for me to care overmuch about the plot when I was spending my time rather hoping that both leads, and their romantic interests, and their various mentors, would all get blown up in a magic trick. (This is all apart from the "oh give me a break" of the last few seconds.) Well. I did like the little birds, but you know, THEY WERE THE ONES GETTING KILLED in the magic trick, which, sniffle. It goes far further than not having anyone to identify with onscreen - I can live with that (see, Northanger Abbey); if I don't like anyone in the film enough to care if they survive, I'm not going to get into it. I admired the film and the first part of the ending (not the last few seconds), but I couldn't like the film, or even enjoy it very much. Whereas I immediately fell in love with the equally if not considerably more implausible magician film that came out at about the same time, The Illusionist, since that offered me a fairly likeable female lead and an entirely likeable, thoroughly sympathetic supporting character in Paul Giamatti's police inspector, to accompany a rather mysterious, but, you know, generally sympathetic character for the male lead. Sure, I can quibble about it (a lot of it) but, I wanted the inspector to figure things out, so I was involved. There. Into the film.
I felt the almost the same way about Batman Begins, although I certainly didn't hate the characters as much. Liked the great starting plot (ludicrous and irritating ending plot), liked the action sequences (HOWEVER RIDICULOUS THE END SETUP) couldn't get into any of the characters (although to be fair part of this was sheer irritation at Katie Holmes which probably no director could have overcome). Almost, because, well, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine gave me someone to like, and Christian Bale was almost likeable. Sometimes. Maybe. Plus, you know, he's Batman, so, coolness factor. So, ok film.
But the only Christopher Nolan film I've been able to admire AND like has been The Dark Knight, which did include three (gasp, three!) likeable characters (Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and whoever was playing Commissioner Gordon), one generally sympathetic character (Harvey Dent) and one utterly compelling, compulsively watchable character - Heath Ledger's Joker. And in this film, the greyness and questionable morals of the lead character worked, because the film was actively questioning this greyness, these issues. (Those of you who have seen Inception and The Prestige can probably guess where I'm going with this.) But still. Three characters that I could cheer for, that I worried over, and four that I wanted to know the fates of.
But otherwise, I'm left chilled by Christopher Nolan films - and their characters.
And I don't think it's the actors, either. Admittedly, I'm drawing a blank on coming up with any characters that Christian Bale has played that I've liked…hmm….hmmm…..(pause to check IMDB) Oh right! Loved the poor kid in Henry V, and he at least started out likeable in Little Women. So he can play likeable, but in his grown-up career, he's tended to focus on playing unsympathetic dudes who are fundamentally jerks (yes, this is includes Bruce Wayne). But Hugh Jackman can be absolutely charming, compelling and likeable, even when given a absolutely crappy script, as can David Bowie, as can Leonardo DiCaprio (at times), as can Cillian Murphy when playing in anything other than a Christopher Nolan film. So I have to go with the explanation that it's not the actors, it's Christopher Nolan - quite possibly ordering them to turn the charm off.
So, Inception.
Just as with The Prestige, we have another intellectually engaging, emotionally uninteresting, and potentially repelling, film, and yet another unsympathetic and unlikeable lead. (The "reveal" at the end does not help.) The film does a little better than The Prestige in some respects, in that Michael Caine is back to being likeable and genial again, yay, and Tom Hardy gives us an immediately likeable and charming scoundrel of a forger. (Inexplicably, Ellen Page is not hooked up with him.) And….that pretty much ends the list of likeable characters (although Ellen Page tries hard, and also tries to add a certain moral voice to a film that is not, for the most part, particularly interested in morality.) Everybody else is blah or unlikeable. Pete Postelwaite is blah and unlikeable. And since Michael Caine and Tom Hardy are not in the film much (they're about third rate supporting characters) it's not enough to draw us in emotionally to the film. And alas, nobody (not even Pete Postelwaite!) but nobody gives us the riveting, utterly compelling of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. We are not just stuck for characters we care about, we are stuck (except for Tom Hardy) for characters who are interesting to watch.
So, you ask, what about the plot? The ideas?
As you've probably heard by now, Inception deals with a group of thieves who can walk into the dreams of others and steal things - specifically, ideas, secrets and the like. I have sometimes been shocked by a sudden detail in a dream showing me that my subconscious has been paying more attention than I have to certain matters, so I can buy this, although I would have thought that at least some effort would need to into interpreting a dream to understand the secret, but, whatever. Let us not dwell on the psychological issues of this. Anyway, to steal ideas, the thieves kidnap their targets, including the always tough Ken Watanabe, put them under sedation, and then go dream hopping through surprisingly sensible and realistic looking dreams, presumably to save on production costs, if later somewhat waved away by the idea that the kidnap victims/targets are actually in carefully constructed dreams made by dream architects (talk about, seriously, my dream career) and presumably the thieves are looking for a relatively comfortable, physically reassuring environment to do all their thieving in, which makes some of their later decisions improbable, but, I digress. (One scene does suggest the intriguing possibility of manufacturing dreams with impossible landscapes, but this sadly ends up leading nowhere.)
This is all fascinating, marvelous, twisted. So, what exactly are these dream stealers going to be using this amazingly advanced kidnapping/dream theft/building technology to do? 1) Steal some engineering plans, for some unknown and never explained reason (why they don't just hire the Leverage team to go steal the plans, I do not know) and 2) try to convince this billionaire billionaire dude that he should break up his company. Why? Well, somebody briefly mentions, you know, energy monopolies and the like, but he's not exactly a trustworthy source, and the point is completely dropped. Oh, and yeah, Leo, who, and this is important, we don't like, trust, or care about much, wants to go see his kid again, so, um, on with the billionaire kidnapping.
Look, dudes. Let me be blunt. If you have the resources to break down the private jet of the world's wealthiest man (implied) (who almost certainly has more than one private jet anyway, and certainly wouldn't have an issue paying for a private charter flight), you have the resources to find a simpler way to either kidnap him for ten hours someplace else, or, alternatively, break up his company some other way. This has got to be the hands down worst method of breaking up a corporate monopoly, ever. And it threw me out of the film, because, well, I couldn't care. Nobody convinced me that breaking up this corporate monopoly was important.
Now, as it happened, I left the film convinced that the entire thing was just a dream - and I am including the "realistic" parts, because, after all, even in those parts, people kept arriving in places with no explanation of how they got there, they were, just the way the dream architects said the dreams were supposed to feel. That, combined with the sheer ridiculous of the plot and a few other matters, had me convinced midway through that it was all just a dream, probably one planted by his wife (I thought this because it was her top and that explained why she kept coming in and out), and that his final resolution to abandon her in the deep dream was an inception planted by her, or by someone else wanting him to move on, to accept that she had moved on, however she had moved on. And that part of the inception involved the thought that once everything was right, once he was back with his children, the top would spin….that, or he was incepted that the top would not stop spinning in a real dream, and he knew enough of dreams to know that he was in one, and his subconscious would not allow the top to stop spinning.
(I didn't see the top wobble in the final shot, as some people are claiming, but I was already going with yeah, this is just another dream within a dream, because who the hell clears up customs that fast - once again, if you have the ability to interfere with U.S. Customs like that, you do not need to kidnap billionaires and mess up their dreams to break up their corporations, plus, the camera work at the end, the way everyone nodded and acknowledged and didn't acknowledge him, the way Michael Caine was suddenly back in Los Angeles even though he'd been in Paris….(yes, there was some throwaway line about Michael Caine bringing presents to the kids, but…whatever)…dream.)
(It's also fair to say that my brother, who saw the film with me, missed all of this, and when I explained my "all a dream" theory, said, "huh." He didn't like the film.)
But, in a dream where you have to do things, you understand that doing these things are critically important - even if you cannot possibly understand or explain why they are important. They may not, as this "break up an international supermonopoly by convincing a guy that his daddy really loves him" make any sense. But they feel compelling, urgent, critical.
The film never gives us this feeling. The closest we get is Ken Watanabe telling us that now is the best time to kidnap this dude on this first class flight, and, so, time to go, and so everyone goes, acting normally. While I'm relieved that the film avoided the cliché of "we're all walking/moving slowly because, dream!" given that in my experience, I don't, and while, yes, I've had banal moments in dreams myself, this is just…realistic. Solid. Not exciting.
After the kidnapping, the action vamps up again, although I have to question: why bother to bring in an architect if she's just going to rip off James Bond films, but, and this is key, this is also when people started having serious problems following what was going on, either because, well, it was all a dream, even the supposed realistic part (as Leo's wife suggests - what with all the dreamlike corporate espionage and everyone chasing him and being unable to get home again) so it doesn't have to make sense, or because they couldn't bring themselves to care. By this time, we've learned that Leo probably had something to do with the death of his wife and abandoned his kids; Ellen Page is perfectly happy to yell at him, but never question the morality of entering someone else's dreams and playing with his thoughts (not to mention the sheer danger of planting thoughts into the brain of such a powerful person -what if they were the wrong thoughts), the drug guy has cheerfully admitted to creating illegal drugs and trapping people in a place where they can no longer distinguish reality from dream, the billionaires are, well, mostly boring, but, probably evil because of the whole monopoly thing, the whatever guy (who at least gets a cool scene in zero grav) had had almost nothing to do and thus not gained much of a personality, which leaves us identifying with and cheering on….the forger, who is about to switch into other bodies giving us really nothing to identify with. Why should we care? I watched how it all played out, intrigued…but never caring.
But here's the larger issue. Yes, Ellen Page does confront Leo about his habit of bringing his dead wife into these constructed dreams, and everyone rightfully gets ticked when they discover that a death in the dream means getting caught in dreamlands for years and coming out with brain mush. But no one confronts the basic morality of kidnapping people to enter their dreams to begin with. This would be less frustrating if the film didn't take itself so seriously, if it was the caper film it halfway wants to be.
But it doesn't, so, that leaves us without anybody really thinking about what they're doing (more argument for "it was all a dream") - an intellectually intriguing film, if one with no emotional depth.
Intriguing enough to blog about at length, though. But I find I get the most frustrated with films that could have, should have, been great…but weren't.