Over at the Volkh Conspiracy, my favorite heavy weight legal blog, Dave Kopel, heavy weight Second Amendment lawyer, posts a very favorable review of Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Inception is a great movie. Perhaps one of the greatest of all time. You should see it without reading reviews, or learning anything about the film beforehand. For those of you who have seen it, some thoughts about various meanings are below the fold.
I don’t know about “one of the greatest [movies] of all time” but it is very fine. I absolutely agree you should go see it, and see it in the big theater.
Comments below the fold.
First, more Kopel, but you should read his whole post if you’re interested in puzzling out exactly what went on:
First some resources: Six Interpretations and Five Plot Holes, by Peter Hall. Cinema Blend has a helpful FAQ and glossary. TechEBlog provides a useful graphic of the dream levels. To keep things straight, let’s adopt their terminology of level 1 (“reality”; takes place in Paris, Mombassa, the airplane cabin), level 2 (dream of the kidnapping of Fischer), level 3 (hotel dream), level 4 (ice world dream), and level 5 (“limbo,” perhaps; Cobb & Mal’s beach city, and Saito’s oriental mansion).
As the above sources details, there are some plot holes which seems difficult to resolve. There are two meta-explanations: One, the movie-makers made mistakes. Two, the incongruities are clues to what’s really happening. Namely that everything in the movie is a dream.
I’m going to propose a third model: I don’t really care. I’m usually a stickler for internal consistency, but for Inception, I just enjoyed the ride.
Here are the comments I posted at VC:
The movie was gorgeous. There is not an ugly setting in the entire film. Even the abandoned factories have a texture, a feeling to them that resonated with me and made long to visit them. When I learned that the dream planners were called “architects”, all I could do was nod.
We didn’t see Cobb’s top fall because Cobb didn’t need to; he knew that it would; he had faith that it would.
Nevertheless, the screen going black was a shock for us. The audience dies and wakes up from the dream of the movie.
Cobb knew that Mal wasn’t real for the best reason that any of us knows that reality is real: the dream Mal could not surprise him the way the real Mal could. Dream Mal was too perfect, too predictable. That’s one of the Great Truths, that reality is deeply surprising.
It is a sign of Cobb’s genius as an Inceptor that Fischer accepted the pinwheel, and all it implied, as a true insight. In fact, we do not know why his father was disappointed in him, but evidently, that resonated with Fischer’s own understanding of himself and his father. It worked because it might well have been true.
Along the same lines, we do not know that Saito’s motive, that Fischer’s business empire was about to become implacable, was accurate. That idea was Saito being a master Inceptor himself, using only the power of words. Cobb did the job in order to rejoin his children, but he needed an external justification, and Saito provided it.
This, perhaps, is the real meaning of the falling top, the false Mal, the children’s faces: Cobb didn’t care whether the final level we see was real or not; all that mattered to him was that he had finally reached a level he was satisfied with, that he found fulfilling.
One of my guilty movie pleasures is Romeo + Juliet by Baz Luhrman, another semi-hallucinatory work. DiCaprio plays Romeo, and is frankly not up to the job; he is the exemplar of “callow youth”. (Clare Danes as Juliet isn’t much better. The supporting performances, now — Ah! Perfection! Including Pete Pete Postlethwaite as Father Laurence.) DiCaprio has matured considerably; he was a much better actor here, and his physical presence is far, far better. Like the sets, he has texture here, he resonates in a way he was unable to do for Luhrman. Unrecognizable in the best sense of the word.
The image of Cobb’s spinning top at the closer grabs people, as it should. But I think people are mistaken when they argue about whether it falls or topples. That’s not the point.
Cobb walks away from it as an act of faith, as I suggested above. Thus does he save himself from Mal’s crisis of belief. This is a situation where no test, no experiment can prove that Cobb has at last returned to the True Reality. His triumph is exactly that he no longer demands proof.
Cobb’s walking away from the top, simply embracing his children and his life, is an act of amazing bravery, grace, and faith.
[update]
Vandam at the New Paltz Journal links; thank you!
He comments:
The standard of approval in moviedom seems to have become whether you should actually go to a theater to see the picture, as opposed to waiting for it to show up on DVD or pay-per-view.
‘Inception’ is apparently in the “go to the theater” category.
The theater standard for me is related to the movie’s visual appeal. Salt, which I saw right before Inception, is an excellent movie, which deserves its own review — but I think it will be almost as good on video, and I think that’s an indicator of its strength.
Inception probably will not hold up as well on the small screen.
I still recommend seeing Salt in the theater, though, simply because it deserves your dollars.
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