If you have not seen the film Inception, then this review is unlikely to make any sense at all beyond what it has to say about the flow of the plot in films generally. If you have seen Inception, read on.
My daughter Emily once asked me:
If we make our own dreams, how come we don’t know what happens next?
Yes, it’s a labyrinth down there.
We still don’t know why we dream, why we sleep, or what goes on when we do. Yet some of us have the temerity to be authoritative about the nature of existence. It’s a wonder.
The problem with making a film about dreams is that films have to move at a certain pace or else they might be thought boring.
And they have to move according to a certain sense of plot or they might be thought nonsense.
So it is a tall order to make a good film about dreams.
When I was a kid there was a certain kind of film that used to annoy me. The action would be rattling on furiously and then the two main protagonists, perhaps a man and a woman, would being a ‘significant’ conversation.
The background would fade away, the noise would fade away (miraculously), and the conversation would be played out. Then with less or more finesse, the background noise would well up again and the action would continue.
Except that the action was going on all the time. It couldn’t just fade away as though it was a supporting role. The action had a life of its own, a rhythm of its own. It couldn’t just be halted to suit the dramatic requirements of the director.
You can’t just stop the narrative of the action you have already set up and take a detour and expect the audience to sit and beat time until the you’ve finished.
Well, you can if you set it up properly. And in a dream you can do just that. A glass wall can slide down and trap you in a cubicle with your long-dead wife. You can be madly interested in getting to Fisher and you can find yourself drawn into a conversation with said long-dead wife.
But you cannot just stop everything you have been doing for the past cinema-hour/dream-week in order to show how the main protagonist is so full of angst over what he did to his long-dead fragile wife that the rest of the action is relegated to second fiddle to it.
And the reason you cannot do it is that it is that the conversation to which you are taking your audience is just not interesting enough.
When I saw the films that used this ‘suspended animation’ techniques, It used to make me wonder how they thought they could get away with it. How could they believe that they could carry audiences through these limping, artificial conversations or passionate moments when the plot was hanging, waiting…
When the point of the plot at that moment was to resuscitate Fischer, there was no way that Cobb was going to take a side turning and stop for an intense and significant talk with his wife.
Not without a device – something that would mean that he had to do it. Something like a glass wall, for example.
And if you tell me it is a subtle hint that the top was never going to stop spinning, then I would say it was too weakly done to grab my perceptions and make them change course.
Who to blame for this?
Well, I guess that Leonardo Di Caprio and the director, Chris Nolan, should share that – in the end it was those two who would have talked through those scenes to get the tenor and pace right and to match the plot.
Apart from that – great film. Really great.