Inception, the latest attempt to make Leonardo DiCaprio a weighty actor, fails in this impossible quest. All the ingredients of Inception are spot-on; great acting, a beguiling premise, a relentless film-noir atmosphere, and clean special effects. But having all the right notes does not necessarily make for a good film. I would hazard that Inception is a victim of its own poor editing, which in the end is far and away the most important aspect of filmmaking. Inception spends too much time dangling the premise before our noses while falling far short of a film’s most important task—creating sympathy and empathy for its characters.

DiCaprio plays Dominic the Extractor, who specializes in stealing ideas of dreams and planting ideas into people’s heads. His fellow cast members are a who’s who in A-list actors who are given frustratingly bland characters: Ken Wantabe giving us the inscrutable Asian routine once again, Joseph Gordon-Levitt still looking like a teenager, Michael Caine’s obligatory wizened old man shtick, Marion Cotillard as the wounded dream-wife always looking for a excuse to stab someone, and a surprisingly restrained (and therefore tolerable) Ellen Page playing a newly hired dream architect who should have been a major character in the story, but barely shows up in the film. Even the great Cillian Murphy (who I still refer to as “My Man Scarecrow”) is handed the most cliché of conflicts, the inability to satisfy his domineering father. He looks as bored as Jeff Bridges did in Iron Man. In essence, Inception boasts a very good looking, talented cast, but the characters inspire nothing but apathy and a sinking feeling of been there-done that.

The plot piles on top of itself like a triple-decker sandwich that’s either about to collapse or give you lockjaw. Inception has none of the Mobius strip charm of Momento or Lost Highway. There are dreams inside of dreams inside of dreams, but all these dives in the human subconscious begin to resemble each other like suburban strip malls. Look, there’s an auto-cypher of a happy family, little children laughing and running into Dominic’s arms, on the beach, naturally. And there’s the stop-motion Matrix style physics to make you feel disoriented. One of the great lines of the movie refers to the fact that you never think a dream is strange until you wake up, yet this intriguing truth is never explored. I was wondering about that until I realized that almost none of these dreams are actually strange.

The crux of Inception’s failure is, ironically enough, the blandness of its imagination. You would think that a technology such as dream manipulation would be an earth-shattering, game changing device, like the automobile or sliced bread. But alas, this most wondrous of inventions is merely at the service at some mundane corporate espionage plot device, some attempt to corner the energy market. Ho hum. And the poverty of the dreamscapes is surprising as well. The dreams we enter are anonymous cities populated by buildings of Dominic and his wife Mallorie’s nostalgia, grey streets that resemble some dreary downtown of a Midwestern city. The only scene that held any interest for me was the opium den of dreams run by chemist Yusuf (a jovially charming Dileep Rao), hinting that all this dream manipulation is becoming this generation’s crack cocaine. Now that’s a premise that could suspend my disbelief. An overbearing score by by Hans Zimmer only helps muddle the scenes, desperately trying to extract drama when there is none.

You’d figure with the unlimited potential of the human imagination, you’d have a sex orgy on a space station or a dinosaur rodeo, but I suppose married life means being shackled to a boring imagination. In short, this film is a more smartly dressed, far less obnoxious version of the migraine-inducing Strange Days. As much as I tried to suspend my disbelief, my dreams weren’t having it. Inception is not a terrible film—it’s too well acted and yes, too well directed (particularly in the case of the Taming of the Page); rather, I would describe Inception as disappointing, after the fearless 70s-style moral ambiguity and rich characterization of Nolan’s Batman films. Perhaps Inception deserves another look on my part, but I simply don’t give a hoot about Dominic and his tortured psyche. It’s nothing a halfway competent psychiatrist couldn’t sort out.

Tags: christopher nolan, inception

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