7-22-10 Movie Review: Inception

Two noncommercial movies tonight, and operas on big screen Sunday and Wednesday: not as rich a menu as we’ve had sometimes, but not a starvation diet. Tonight at 7, the Orpheum shows Mel Brooks’ classic western Blazing Saddles, with Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Slim Pickens, Dom DeLuise, David Huddleton, and Brooks himself, the movie that brought intestinal gas to the screen. An hour later, tonight at 8, the Tallgrass Al Fresco series will show a Tallgrass short subject and a movie voted the funniest of all time, Some Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe, I am alone in thinking a little overweight, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, in drag, at the Brickyard, 129 North Rock Island. And for the culturally inclined, we have two Metropolitan Opera performances, Puccini’s Turandot Sunday at 2:30 and Bizet’s ever-popular Carman Wednesday at 6:30 in the Murdock Theatre at 536 North Broadway.

And commercially, we have Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page in Inception.

All the four reviewers I have sampled gave Inception a rave, with three of them recommending that you see it twice; but none of them committed themselves to having understood it, and Richard Corliss in Time magazine suggested that the DVD might benefit by what amount to footnotes. The one man I spoke with too briefly after the show said he had understood it all but, I quote exactly, “kept punching holes in it,” which suggests he didn’t find the plot holding together. Entertainment Weekly says that producer/writer/director Christopher “Nolan insists that Inception doesn’t try to confound its audience,” which suggests that it is perhaps not entirely successful at achieving its intended goals. I am certainly not going to try to explain its plot, or to see it twice.

The problem stems from its theme of invading people’s dreams, sometimes injecting things into them and frequently swapping around among them. When, as the review in the Eagle put it, the main characters “all fall asleep and dream together,” the problems really mount. The problem all along has been aggravated by the difficulty of telling whether the character we see is the real person, the person in his or her own dream, the person in somebody else’s dream, or the person at some time in the past. This does not do a lot for clarity of characterization, and in fact I didn’t find myself giving much of a hoot about anybody or what became of anybody.

This problem was aggravated by the need for an enormous amount of exposition, which becomes repetitious without being very helpful; I would guess that a good fifth of the dialogue is devoted to explaining the plot, and there is precious little characterization in doing that. Newsweek suggests that Inception is based on what I find similar to the background of a lot of current movies, the idea that “reality is so fraught and problematic that we need to go elsewhere – out of this world or deep into our minds – to see things clearly.” It’s not the only incoherent movie on the current screen, but It may be the only one people try to explain.

But even by today’s demanding standards, the special effects are extraordinary fine. They’re all a lot of people will care about, and I myself may buy the DVD if it has enough about how they were done.