Inception

Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream

2010 // USA // Christopher Nolan // July 22, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B+ - "Ambitious" is a term frequently affixed to films solely due to the scale or complexity of their production, whether the work in question is one of the opulent, magisterial epics of old or a contemporary blockbuster that recruits battalions of computer wizards for its virtual world-building. One could say that Christopher Nolan's Batman films warrant the label, if only because of their fulsome design and dizzying scope. However, Nolan's taste for the ambitious is focused foremost on narrative, as epitomized in the disorienting, reversed chronology of his breakout art-house noir, Memento. Two years after The Dark Knight trampled everything in its path, that film's sprawling, relentless, and often preposterous plot nonetheless endures as a grueling feat of sustained anxiety and twenty-first century terror. Now we come to Inception, the first feature written solely by Nolan since his 1998 debut Following, and it is, if anything, a doubling down on the director's fascination with convoluted storytelling. Who else but Nolan could weave a tale that unfolds simultaneously in four linked dream worlds, where time dilates to varying degrees but always ticks inexorably forward? Who else would have the heedless ambition to even attempt such a thing, to convey such an elaborate scenario through the language of film? Who else but Christopher Nolan would even want to try?

Set in the unspecified but not-too-distant future, the film introduces us to Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a pair of "extractors": black-market mind-hackers who are skilled at ferreting out a person's most closely guarded secrets, preferably without their knowledge. To accomplish this, the sleeping victim is shunted into a dream world constructed by the extractors, who them attempt to outwit the victim and recover the secret, quite literally in their sleep. Given that this is a Christopher Nolan joint, the process is a good deal more complex than this straightforward description might suggest. Most of the first forty minutes or so of Inception are occupied with elucidating the rules of the film's central science-fiction conceits, although the exposition continues in dribbles well into the third act. One might expect this to render the film almost unbearably talky, but Nolan does a characteristically masterful job of blending together the showing and the telling, cutting across past and present and weaving in voice-over. This approach has been a essential aspect of the director's dramatic arsenal since Batman Begins, but the effect remains engrossing, propulsive, and a little cheeky, as if Nolan were daring us to keep up. The principles governing the process of extraction are bent (and often broken) as quickly as the film establishes them, providing little accommodation for viewers who stumble over the conceptual twists and turns.

During an extraction in the mind of a Japanese tycoon named Saito (Ken Wanatabe), Cobb and Arthur are stymied when their victim reveals that he is wise to the pair's tricks, which include a dream-within-a-dream ruse. They soon learn that Saito is actually auditioning them for a more challenging task: a reverse extraction known as an inception, which entails planting an idea so deeply in the victim's mind that they believe it to be their own. Saito wants Cobb to subconsciously convince Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of a billionaire rival, to break up his family's empire following his father's death. Moreover, Saito insists on tagging along during the inception in order to protect his investment. Despite his misgivings, Cobb accepts the job, chiefly because Saito pledges to eradicate his criminal record, arrange for his legal entry into the United States, and reunite him with his children.

This sets up the rest of the story, which, when you strip away the mind-bending sci-fi trappings, is essentially a heist film. True to the form of the genre, Cobb and Arthur set off on a globe-trotting mission to recruit an international team of experts for this unlikely feat of mind-hackery. Their team includes Eames (Tom Hardy), an undercover operative who poses as one of Fischer's confidants in the dream; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a pharmacologist who devises a specialized sedative; and Ariadne (Ellen Page), a prodigy skilled at constructing the custom dreamscapes the team utilizes for the inception. These dreamscapes are decidedly crisp affairs, more akin to virtual reality simulations than the fluid, surreal environments of real dreams. All the same, Nolan makes ingenious use of the familiar uncanniness of our sleeping world, lending credibility to the notion that the film's slick, stylish vistas are actually dominions of the mind. Confronting a man in the dreamscape, Cobb poses the question, "How did you get here?" The dreamer can't answer, because dreams don't ever seem to have real beginnings, do they? You're hailing a cab on a street corner, sitting in a hotel bar, standing on a snowy mountainside, and you're off. Moreover, time dilates in the dreamscape, such that an hour takes only five minutes in the real world, a detail that seems spookily accurate given my own dreaming experiences.

Saito arranges for the team to be alone with Fischer in the first-class cabin of a trans-oceanic flight, where they drug him and begin the mind-hack. As if their task weren't challenging enough, Cobb explains that in order to shield the team from detection, they must create three successive layers of dreams and escort Fischer through them in order to seed the notion of a corporate breakup at the "lowest" level: a dream within a dream within a dream. The events in a higher dream echo downward, such that a dreamer spattered with water in Dream A will find it begins to rain in Dream B. Moreover, this nesting of dreamscapes results in greater and greater time dilation the deeper the team goes, which is basically a clever excuse for Nolan to indulge in some phenomenally inventive, vertigo-inducing storytelling. To cite the most conspicuous example, roughly the final hour of the film takes place during the few seconds it takes a van to fall from a bridge into a river. As bewildering as it can be to keep up with the multiple storylines and different rates of time, Nolan somehow manages to continually tighten the vice, such that the entire heist essentially plays as a stacked series of action sequences, each one dependent on the outcome of the next. The story's complexity is nothing short of breathtaking, with Nolan pulling off the narrative equivalent of a plate-spinning act.

The final wrinkle comes in the form of Mal (Marion Cotillard), a spiteful hobgoblin that lurks in Cobb's subconscious and is based on memories of his wife. She—who, of course, isn't a "she" at all, but actually a fragment of Cobb's own mind—has a nasty habit of maliciously sabotaging his dreamscapes. Cobb hasn't revealed this to his team, but Ariadne quickly tumbles to the fact that he is hiding crucial details about his past and endangering them all. This aspect of the story inevitably calls to mind Shutter Island from earlier this year, in that both films feature DiCaprio in the role of a man whose guilt has psychologically mutilated him. However, the success of Scorsese's film rests to a large extent on the palpable rawness of DiCaprio's anguish, while Nolan asks little of the actor other than sheer conviction. This isn't inconsistent with Nolan's post-Memento mode: evocative and moody, often with a bitter-sour tang, but lacking a truly poignant connection between character and viewer. Such a negligent approach to character needn't be a failing, given that a convoluted action film executed with acrobatic deftness has a purity all its own. However, it does betray that Nolan himself never quite accepts the supposed emotional potency of Cobb and Mal's tragic story, which invites the question of why the viewer should care. Inception's real strength is that of an exigent science-fiction thriller that pushes the limits of storytelling, the sort of grand cinematic contraption that seduces with its sheer baroque audacity. Nolan's vision may be more polished and literal-minded than a genuine state of dreaming, but it nonetheless leaves you breathless, unsteady, and wondering what just happened.

A Study in Scarlet (and Other Hues)

Blogger and prolific commenter MovieMan0283 has proposed an intriguing meme at his place, The Dancing Image. Taking a cue from the open gallery of reader-submitted film stills hosted by Stephen at Checking on My Sausages, MovieMan has proposed a bit of a free-form exercise, wherein participants assemble a collection of screen captures that follow a theme of their choice. MovieMan got the ball rolling with a stellar series of stills from opening shots. My own submission is below. I think the theme is self-evident, although in a couple of instances it is realized in an unconventional way. The films are identified at the bottom.

• Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
• Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
• Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)
• Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
• Predator (John McTiernan, 1987)
• Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990)
• Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
• Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
• Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004)
• Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
• Sin City (Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, 2005)
• No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007)
• Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

They may not even notice (or they may already have participated), but I'm tagging Tim at Antagony and Ecstasy, Troy at Elusive as Robert Denby, The Film Doctor, Bill at The Kind of Face You Hate, and Jason at The Cooler.

Throne of Blood

1957 // Japan // Akira Kurosawa // July 18, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Throne of Blood was screened on July 18, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the films of Akira Kurosawa, in honor of his centennial birthday.]

When it comes to adaptations of Macbeth, restraint is not usually part of the equation, and Kurosawa's thrilling take on the Bard's succinct, bloody tragedy is no exception. I'll let those more familiar with Japanese culture than I hold forth on the director's use of Noh drama conventions in the film. For me, the most remarkable aspect of Throne of Blood is the potency with which the director and writers convey the tragedy's distinctly Greek patrimony. I've always found one of Macbeth's most compelling themes to be the mystery of free will, a focus that marks the play as an heir to a vital Hellenistic tradition, epitomized in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. However, Shakespeare and Kurosawa probe beyond the rudimentary paradoxes that crop up wherever prophecies of doom are concerned, conveying the supremacy of our baser natures over our noblest aspirations, as well as the essential helplessness that characterizes so much of the human experience.

Moreover, there's an undeniable and incredibly fruitful tension at work in Throne of Blood between the Kurosawa the tale-spinner and Kurosawa the humanist. It's clear the director has a lot of affection for the bombastic, exaggerated dimensions of the story, evident in the way Toshirô Mifune's Washizu stalks around bow-legged, stiff-spined, and eyes bulging. Or in the discordant whistle that pierces the soundtrack when Washizu learns he has been named master of the Northern Garrison. (Just! Like! The! Spirit! PREDICTED!) However, the film always retains a sense of mournfulness and desperation that gives it greater weight than that of a mere wicked fairy tale. Kurosawa and Mifune manage to make Washizu genuinely pitiable—he actually evokes a whimpering child when Miki's ghost makes its appearance—even as the man succumbs to the blackest, most putrescent excesses of hubris. And of course, there is Isuzu Yamada's turn as the terrifying Asaji, who makes Lady Macbeth seem like a quivering piker by comparison. It's not a perfect film. Too often, Kurosawa laboriously extends sequences that don't seem to warrant such treatment, as in Washizu and Miki's wanderings after their encounter with the forest spirit, or in the Lord Tzuzuki's funeral procession. Yet Throne of Blood stands out as one of the finest filmic adaptations of Shakespeare I've seen, capturing the spirit of the source material perfectly while also serving as an exceptional cinematic work in its own right.

The Killer Inside Me

What's It Like to Be the Bad Man?​

2010 // USA // Michael Winterbottom // July 12, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

B - Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 noir novel The Killer Inside Me is not an enjoyable film, at least as one usually applies the term to a movie-going experience. Nor is it without vexing structural flaws. And yet it is an undeniably fascinating work, an absorbing and unnervingly insistent portrayal of a murderous mind that joins the ranks of cult notables such as Mary Harron's American Psycho and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. However, the gaze of Winterbottom's film reaches back to a more distant point. Specifically, to Psycho, whose particular cinematic genius the film cannibalizes and assimilates into its own strange approach. Working from a screenplay by director John Curran, Winterbottom maintains a literate awareness of Hitchcock's seminal thriller throughout his film, without resorting to shameless appropriation or self-conscious homage. Thompson's novel has made the jump to the screen before, in a 1976 Stacy Keach vehicle directed by Burt Kennedy. However, the new film does not carry the telltale odor of a flimsy remake, nor that of an adaptation overly beholden to its source material. This new take on The Killer Inside Me is insolent and distinctly cinematic. It ambles along a lurid, eccentric path on an unsettling mission: to convey both the hideous normalcy and incomprehensible disconnection of the psychopathic mind.

The film presents the tale of Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), a clean-cut, gawky deputy sheriff in rural 1950s Texas. Lou doesn't carry a service revolver; the most hazardous part of his job entails placating local bigwigs such as construction mogul Chester Conway (Ned Beatty) and union boss Joe Rothman (Elias Koteas). Lou is well-mannered and soft-spoken, a country boy who spends his nights reading while listening to opera, when he's not romancing his sweet-as-sugar girlfriend, Amy (Kate Hudson). Lou is also a coldblooded murderer, as the film's title and promotion make abundantly clear. Where you or I have empathy and remorse, Lou has... nothing. He's a Hollow Man. In flashback, we learn that Lou's masochistic mother nurtured a streak of sexual sadism in the boy from a young age. It's not clear whether this abuse stunted Lou's moral development, or merely exacerbated what was already a disturbed mind. It doesn't really matter. There's no struggle between saint and sinner beneath Lou's canted Stetson; he's a monster through and through. The only tribulation that he even seems to acknowledge is the sheer challenge of evading capture for as long as possible. Fortunately for Lou, he's an excellent liar, the sort of aw-shucks bullshit artist who can improvise on cue and has an answer for everything.

In the film's opening scenes, the sheriff (Tom Bower) sends Lou off on something of a shit task: convince a local prostitute, Joyce (Jessica Alba) to pull up stakes and leave town. Lou's confrontation with the woman escalates to a brutal assault that satisfies his taste for sexual violence, and then turns on a dime into a bout of mutually enthusiastic screwing. The pair begin to make a regular thing of this game, but complications ensue: one of Joyce's clients is Elmer Conway (Jay R. Ferguson) the lunkhead son of the aforementioned construction mogul. Daddy Conway wants Lou to act as a bagman and pay off the whore who has beguiled his son. Instead, Lou hatches a scheme wherein Joyce will abscond with Elmer and the money, then ditch the dupe and rendezvous with Lou later. Incidentally, Elmer's shoddy construction work may or may have not resulted in the death of Lou's half-brother, a fact that the union boss uses to tweak the deputy. I said it was complicated, didn't I?

Ultimately, this elaborate and often aggravating plot is essentially just the set-up for Lou's sudden and unspeakably brutal betrayal of Joyce, whom he beats to death in one of the film's most disturbing and audacious scenes. Not that violence perpetrated by men against women is all that uncommon in cinema, but it's rarely portrayed as unflinchingly as it is here, without the glamorization or weird elision that characterizes action film editing. Instead, what we get is several nearly unbearable minutes of a man pounding the head of a defenseless, essentially unresisting woman into bloody hamburger with his bare fists. This is presented with the steadiness one might normally exhibit when observing a man painting a fence. Right about now, you probably already have a fairly robust notion of whether there is any chance in hell of you ever seeing this film, so there's not much point in attempting to convince the doubters that this graphic violence is essential, even if it is repulsive. However, I will proffer that it enhances the dissonance that pervades the rest of the film, which is mainly concerned with the lengths that Lou must go to in order to conceal his role in the murder. He has to tell lie after lie, attempt to rectify a handful of crucial blunders, and commit more crimes, whose cover-up demands still more crimes, and so on.

Winterbottom's model here is, of course, Psycho, with its superbly cunning shift in sympathy from the slain femme fatale to the quiet man who is protecting her murderer. The savagery of Lou's violent impulses only heightens the film's rising sense of disorientation and gnawing unease. "This guy can't be the story's hero, can he?" Eventually, it becomes apparent that there are no heroes in this world, not even a laconic private eye to ferret out Lou's sins. The deputy's antagonists are a smug district attorney, an opportunistic vagrant, and that devious union boss. (The latter leans on Lou with his Peter Falk routine, but he isn't looking out for anyone but himself.) Winterbottom offers no emotional handholds in this story but those that project from Lou himself, which I suppose is a kind of artistic sadism, but also magnificent in its ruthlessness. Following along from a monster's point of view engenders a sense of helplessness that is only enhanced by Affleck's performance. Lou is languidly charming in public, urgent and vicious in the bedroom, and coolly blank in private. He is a cipher, and doesn't ask for or want our understanding. The film hints at what might be going on behind those reptilian eyes—finding dirty pictures of his mother in a family Bible, Lou calmly burns them—but there is no psychologist to offer a concluding exegesis here. We can only sit in stunned silence and wonder at how a human brain can break so bad.

The flaws that afflict The Killer Inside Me are mainly pacing problems. They are particularly conspicuous following a pivotal murder, after which Winterbottom seems to lose his capacity for linking scenes together coherently. The passage of time becomes ambiguous, and the story begins to feel disjointed and even clumsy. More generous viewers might regard this as consistent with the delusional aspects of Lou's madness, which eventually begin to intrude directly into the film. I'm inclined towards the simpler explanation: standard-issue third act narrative aimlessness. That said, the corrosion of reality is perhaps inevitable in any work that approaches madness from a first-person perspective. Curran's screenplay indulges in escalating strangeness as Lou's final fate draws near, and by the time it descends into soap opera silliness, it's abundantly clear that the film has fractured to match the deputy's mind. We're dwelling entirely within Lou's diseased headspace by the end, and the events that unfold reveal a vacant mind that echoes with obsessions, a place where virtuous love and violent depravity have the same tune.

Sherlock Holmes

2009 // USA // Guy Ritchie // July 11, 2010 // Blu-ray - Warner Brothers (2010)

C+ - Guy Ritchie purges the Victorian starch (and elegance) from Doyle's sleuth, while preserving Holmes' spooky powers of deduction and highlighting forgotten character details, such as the Great Detective's talent for bare-knuckle boxing and his penchant for narcotics. Purists will doubtlessly blanch at the director's approach, which paints Holmes as a superhero for a steampunk-tinged nineteenth century London. However, Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal possesses sufficient odd-duck touches to render this Sherlock a credible (if multiplex-friendly) variation on the iconic character. Witty and rollicking, the film focuses on a Holmesian mainstay—banal evil dressed up in mystical garb—and generally succeeds, despite a story stuffed with baffling plot holes. The gaggle of writers (surprise!) are too eager to sacrifice consistency for the sake of action, and leave far too much unexplained, despite a coda where Holmes sweeps away a plethora of seemingly supernatural events with his vaunted reason. Still, there's plenty of glint to admire on this bauble, whether in Ritchie's flamboyant style, Hans Zimmer's lively score (his most flat-out stimulating in years), or the consistently rich art direction, which relies heavily on conspicuous computer effects, but still manages to delight. Sherlock Holmes suggests that anachronistic Victorian adventure can be guilty good fun, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen be damned.

Ran

1985 // Japan // Akira Kurosawa // July 5, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Ran is being screened on July 2-6 and 8, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the films of Akira Kurosawa, in honor of his centennial birthday.]

Ran is something of a seminal film for me. It was not only the first Kurosawa film I ever saw, but also the first non-animated Japanese film and the first non-English-language epic. It remains the only staging, adaptation, or re-imagining of King Lear I've ever seen, live or filmed. On this point, I think that Kurosawa's take—which owes as much, if not more, to legends of the historical daimyo Mori Motonari than it does to the Bard—makes for better cinema than a stricter adaptation of Lear might have made. Ran doesn't really have any analogues to the often confusing Gloucester plot threads in Shakespeare's tragedy. The story rests on the simple formula of the Great Lord and the Three Sons, with Lady Kaede thrown in as the wild card (or the ace up Misfortune's sleeve, depending on you look at it). That said, at its core, Ran is fundamentally a singularly bleak Shakespearean tragedy, stocked with characters who lament (to the heavens, no less) the cruel, capricious, bloody nature of the human condition in suitably purple prose. It's a flawlessly grim film, where even the jester Kyoami's japes seem ripe with dire portent, and it is this discipline in tone that prevents Ran from sliding into the depths of angst-ridden self-parody.

Consistent with what I suspect is the pattern for most viewers, the first time I saw the film, the bloody siege of the Third Castle is what stuck in my mind, along with Tatsuya Nakadai's frightening visage. To be sure, the siege remains a brutal, utterly de-romanticized depiction of warfare, but repeat viewings reveal a slower film than one might remember, replete with pauses, meanderings, and lengthy shots of little more than Nakadai's Hidetora reacting to each fresh twist of fate with stupefied, goggle-eyed horror. Which isn't to say that Ran is a sedate film, by any means. With the exception of the opening sequence on a bucolic green hilltop, the scenes in which very little action is occurring are nonetheless characterized by an uncanny "offness," frequently underlined by natural sounds that intrude into visually placid moments, bestowing a sense of alarm and discord. This gives the audience ample time to savor the pure cinematic majesty of the film, while still maintaining a gnawing awareness that events are tumbling into chaos.

This was my first time experiencing Ran on the big screen, and I discerned endless details that I had never picked up on before. The most startling occurs in the final shots, as Suburo's army marches away in grief across a barren plain. Eventually the films cuts to a closer shot of the orange cliffs that loom behind the army, where blind Tsurumaru waits on the precipice for his sister. I had never before observed that Tsurumaru is actually visible in that initial long shot, as little more than a dot on the cliffs. That detail, putting an actor on that precipice, all so that there would be that little shadowed speck there, and the audience would gasp, "Oh my God, is that the blind guy, still standing there...?" just before the cut that confirms it... well, that's what epic film-making in the days before CGI was all about.