Cerebral drooling is what you would end up doing while watching ‘Inception’ and whether you fully understand it or not, it gets you thinking. Christopher Nolan’s creation is as path breaking as ‘The Matrix’ was a decade ago, albeit a tad simpler.
The film revolves around Cobb, an extractor, who can extract thoughts and ideas from the dreams of people and use it to steal. He is estranged from his children and away from the United States as he is facing charges of killing his wife, a person trained in dream traversing herself. Unable to handle her own confusion between what is dream and what is real, she ends her life, not before writing to the police that her life is in danger from her husband. She troubles him during his excursions in the dream world and seeks his return to dwell there permanently. He has an offer in front of him. A Japanese businessman wants him to do the opposite of extraction: inception, i.e. to plant an idea in the mind of his terminally ill corporate rival’s son, to dismantle his father’s business after he dies.
The challenge is to use the complex relationship between father and son, to build a layered dream world, built by Cobb and his team, where the son would encounter people and experiences that would make him realize that his father wanted him to do something on his own instead of carrying on from where he left off. The concept of time in each dream layer is a multiple of the previous layer. The opportunity to do it is in a long flight from Tokyo to LA, where the son is sedated and Cobb and his team get into his dreams to guide him to the objective. Whether they are able to pull it off or not is what needs to be seen.
If creating this complex world on paper is difficult, creating it on screen is even more difficult. Christopher Nolan has impressed us in the last decade with his rehashing of the Batman franchise and shown a penchant for exploring the ways of the mind. With ‘Inception’, he succeeds in revealing the workings of the dream world at regular interval so that even those who are slow to catch up can move along with the story. His handling of the multi-layered dream world is excellent and his portrayal of the concept of time differential is superb and is the thread that holds the film together. However, in the last 30 minutes he could have added an additional dramatic element of making the time remaining more apparent to the viewer.
A stellar cast delivers with Leonardo DiCaprio leading from the front as the gifted yet troubled dreamer and is ably supported by the likes of Marion Cotillard as his wife and a host of good actors essaying the roles of dream architects, chemists, impersonators and researchers. There are no standout performances but the concept shines in the end against any individual.
Watch ‘Inception’ for yet another turning point in the history of storytelling, which seems to be going deeper and deeper within these days.