Let me begin by admitting that I view this movie with somewhat of a bias: I hate Ellen Page. Yes, hate is a strong word, perhaps even too strong for this situation, but it gets the point across. With her face frozen in bewilderment and her walk of aggressive sass, Page stuck out like a sore, gangrenous thumb amongst an otherwise stellar cast.
Some of the agony, oddly enough, wasn’t her fault. Christopher Nolan utilized the cheap narrative tactic of creating a character that existed to be stand-in for the audience. With this, instead of finding a creative ways to exhibit information, he simply found situations where the stand-in character could ask questions and be told explicitly what was going on or what had occurred previously. This tactic makes points clear, but it is also a sign of lazy storytelling. As a result, Page was even more false than usual, trying to hold her own as a confidant to the central figure, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, and work as the only figure who is a sloppy symbol instead of a full throttle individual. We have less information about the lives of many other characters in the film and yet they are able to come across as more full fleshed, which is a credit to those segments of the script but also serves to emphasize the flaws in more dominant figures.
Not that all acting was stellar across the board. Most, if not all, actors have a performance symptom that they fall into at times of pressure or uncertainty. Sometimes, these quirks work toward the performance and very often are characteristics that have helped them in their early, less meaty, work. It is one of the many jobs of the director to watch for these quirks and adjust them when they are inappropriate for the situation. In this case, all of the top figures of the film fell victim to their quirks with no perceivable intervention, which caused a slight, perhaps negligible, drag on the action. This is balanced by phenomenally thorough performances by secondary characters, most markedly the lovely Marion Cotillard and striking Cillian Murphy.
On the whole, Inceptionis a keen, surface level thriller. A lot of work obviously went into the creation of a complex concept and an intriguing problem followed by a fascinating struggle and fulfilling conclusion. The problem is that though the exciting structure is there, the project has a troublesome interior. It is not enough, in my opinion, to create a behemoth of an idea without following through with all elements of the project. That is to say, it is insulting to the audience to make some so big and flashy that you can’t be bothered to take it beyond the superficial, however stunning that superficial may be. Filmmakers who don’t have respect for their audience are a large reason of why we have such a dumbed-down audience today. Like a mistreated spouse, when respect isn’t shown they cease to expect respect and, after a while, don’t know how to receive it.
In addition to finding a way to reveal the exhibition beyond unnatural talking, as well as fleshing out the obnoxiously two-dimensional Page character, there is the issue of special effects. While something may be amazing the first time, when you use the same reel over and over, the punch is gone. It is always tempting to frequently display a cool creation, but when done too much the flavor becomes stale and the wonder is dimmed. To be fair though, watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt float in slow motion for the fiftieth time is small compared to other narrative offenses.
Along with the visual and performance aspects, I want to make a small note about sound. This might be asking far too much, of both a twenty-first century American film as well as a twenty-first century American audience (myself included), but I couldn’t help but wonder through the majority of the film, what the experience would be like when completely void of a soundtrack. As far as I can imagine, a movie like this that only used sound from the situation, as opposed to a dramatic score, would be absolutely terrifying. Not in the sense of scary monsters popping from under the bed, but the haunting effect of constantly being on guard for some new noise or image with no external guide. I’m convinced that if this film only gave us ambient sound, the majority of the audience would have nightmares on scale with the characters in the film, even if they can’t quite identify the root once they’re awake.
-Dosty Glory
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