Can't get you out of my head

Damn you, Chris Nolan — your ‘Inception’ is a heist film in more ways than one.

After a season of reboots, remakes and sequels, moviegoers who dislike being talked down to are now simmering with excitement at the release of Inception. Christopher Nolan’s latest work, a post-Dark Knight thriller set in the labyrinth of the subconscious, has been triggering a lot of talk not just because of its ridiculous star wattage — Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ken Watanabe round out the ensemble — but because it’s mind-boggling in the best way possible.

While it is shaping up to be the most meaningful pursuit in a summer filled with disposable productions, Inception certainly isn’t the British director’s first time to knock out a clever and stylish picture. 2005’s Batman Begins introduced me to the filmmaker’s brand of visual flash, but it was the year after that I caught a glimpse of his love for complex and immersive storylines.

The Prestige, featuring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians in 19th-century England, was hard to pigeonhole in that it melded suspense, mystery, science fiction and drama, Scarlett Johansson’s unconvincing English accent aside. With twist after twist, The Prestige and its message about self-destruction, obsession and retribution is the kind of nuanced flick you can theorize about for weeks. It was clearly more engaging than that other film about Victorian conjurors released at the same time, The Illusionist.    

If The Prestige is a millefeuille of a movie — with so many layers — Inception is more like a matryoshka doll. As “your mind is the scene of the crime,” the film can be considered one giant dreamscape, with memory, emotion and reality forming an increasingly fantastic series of meta-narratives. When asked by friends to sum up Inception, I took a cue from its dream-in-a-dream storytelling and said it was GI Joe inside The Matrix inside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind inside Being John Malkovich in a hall of mirrors with the chick from Juno. That effusion is the polar opposite my one-word review of Eclipse: “Failfest.”

The seventh offering in a résumé that includes the widely admired Memento and two Batman blockbusters, Inception is far from perfect. It does, however, prove that Chris Nolan is both a master of adaptability and a creature of habit. Free financial rein may have something to do with it, but he has started to prove his range as an artist by taking on comic book adaptations and period projects. On the other hand, I noticed that he is prone to casting semi-regulars like Michael Caine and Christian — both were in the Batman movies and The Prestige; Caine is also in Inception — and has a penchant for topics only psych majors are familiar with. It seems he has been nothing but consistent with his mix of artistry and commerce, something Michel Gondry and M. Night Shyamalan should emulate. 

One of my favorite scenes in Inception involves an imaginary Paris folding unto itself like a pop-up book. It’s a classic WTF moment, a fitting metaphor for the way original cinema — or relatively original, at least — takes your brain hostage and forces you to spew out some cheesy Queen lyrics: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”

Damn you, Chris Nolan — your Inception is a heist film in more ways than one.      

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