Inception

Jake and I saw Inception today, and while I liked the movie, it’s one of the trailers that really blew my mind.

They’ve made a movie about the creation of Facebook. No kidding. It’s called The Social Network and the trailer was about as thrilling as the title. While I enjoyed Jessie Eisenberg in Zombieland, I’m not following him to this execrable commercial-as-drama. What’ll be next, You’ve Got Gmail? Unless the Harvard students in this film develop a hunger for human brains, I’ll sit this one out.

But back to Inception. I almost didn’t see it because I happen to dislike Leonardo DiCaprio, or as he’s known in this household, Leonardo DiCrapio. He’s one of those actors (like Tom Cruise) who, for me anyway, always seems like he’s playing a role rather than living the character. Karen sat this one out because she’s even less forgiving than me — she thought his portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator was lifeless.

Having seen the movie, I have one thing to say. Or rather, one thing to photoshop.

Just a few comments for now, since it’s late and I still need to play Civilization IV and kick some Incan ass. (Hey, they started it!) But first, if you haven’t read a review, here’s the movie in a nutshell: DiCaprio’s character (Cobb) and his band of technicians/psychologists/artists (they’re a bit of all three) can delve into a dreamer’s mind to extract secrets. They’re industrial espionage operatives, and they’ve been given a new job: to plant an idea, which in their parlance is known as inception. Cobb would rather not take this one on, since inception is either difficult or impossible (and, we come to learn, dicey emotional turf for him), but his employer, Saito, makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Pull this one off and Saito will fix some pending charges back home that prevent Cobb from returning to his family.

Hey, um . . . now, why couldn’t his family rejoin him in some extradition-less foreign country? Forget it, forget it. Suspend disbelief.

Some thoughts . . .

1. The movie has an interesting narrative structure. Not as ingenious as director Christopher Nolan’s earlier Memento, but still challenging. At one point in the movie, the dreams are nested four deep, so there are five layers of reality (one real one, four dream), and Nolan still manages to tell a clear story.

2. Which is not to say that the plot doesn’t have problems. Jake and I being Hoffmans, we promptly tore it apart not five minutes out of the theater.

Which is not to say that we didn’t still enjoy it.

3. Nolan wrote the screenplay, too, and he made superb use of a literary device known as resonance — repetition of a word or image (in Inception‘s case, some of both) to achieve depth and emotional punch. Marvelous work.

4. This movie is a smorgasbord of former child actors. Lukas Haas (remember the kid in Witness?) is here, as is Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“Third Rock from the Sun”). Ellen Page was in two TV shows as a kid: something called “Pit Pony” and another something called “Trailer Park Boys.” And Leonardo DiCaprio made his bones as a teenager in “Santa Barbara,” “Roseanne,” and “Parenthood.”

5. The science is bankrupt, inasmuch as Nolan perpetuates an old myth that time passes more slowly in dreams than it does in the real world. Did I say that right? In other words, five minutes in a dream equals one hour in the real world, something like that, and the deeper nested you are in dreams, the more the time dilation is magnified. Not a minor plot point — crucial, in fact.

A renowned sleep and dream researcher named William Dement determined something like 40 years ago that time passes at the same rate in dreams as it does in the real world. He did this by waking subjects up at a specified time following the onset of REM sleep and asking them to recount what they had experienced. Repeatedly, five minutes of dream time contained about five minutes worth of stuff, ten minutes encompassed ten minutes, and so forth.

But don’t let that spoil your enjoyment of the movie.

5. One thing I really, really liked: you know how in caper movies (think Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example), the premise and the characters are set up in the beginning with an action-packed caper holding plenty of near-disasters, but the final result is oh so slick? Well in Inception, the initial caper goes to hell and then gets worse. So refreshing. Also refreshing: it’s a movie about dreams, and yet Nolan avoided scenes with gratuitous sex and nudity.

That’s it for now . . . what did you think?

D.