July 2010 ¦¦ -4- ¦¦ the Nolans: ‘inCeptioN’ [7/10] and ‘Following’ (1998) [5/10]

Published on: July 26th, 2010

.   Inception   .

Another person’s grief is like another person’s dreams or dogs — a matter of indifference.

Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, p255.

Inception is a paradox. By the current standards of Hollywood summer blockbusters, it’s quite dazzlingly original, being neither a sequel nor a remake, rather the largely uncompromised brainchild of a writer-director whose success with The Dark Knight gave him the kind of creative carte blanche very few big-budget film-maker have enjoyed since Stanley Kubrick’s heyday.
   Nolan was thus able to realise what is a “dream project” in every sense – one that has reportedly been in gestation for a decade, involving a team of psychic agents who can in effect ‘transport’ themselves into the unconscious mind of a sleeping subject and thereby either “steal” or implant information.
   The result, which could easily have tipped over into hubristic folly, over-complicated obfuscation, and/or elaborately high-falutin’ interlocking metaphors for Nolan’s creative processes, has become instead 2010′s “art film for the masses”, as Danny Peary once described Antonioni’s Blow-Up. 
   Ecstatic reviews (at least in the USA) and strong word-of-mouth (both sides of the pond) have translated into unexpectedly potent box-office returns – not quite at Dark Knight levels, but surely much closer than anyone connected with the project serious dared to (ahem) imagine. An encouraging development for those despairing at the homogenised, blanded-out crud so regularly cluttering up the planet’s multiplex screens.
   But Inception is also fundamentally derivative – a mish-mash of predecessors and influences, not all of them cinematic: think Philip K Dick’s Ubik or Eye in the Sky as illustrated by M C Escher. Leaving aside the likes of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Matrix, the key big-screen forebears in terms of dream-state navigation are perhaps Joseph Ruben’s Dreamscape (1984, co-written with David Loughery and Chuck Russell) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), the former a guilty-pleasure B-movie par excellence, the latter an intellectual jeu d’esprit whose exposure was largely confined to arthouses.
   Somewhat ironic, then, that Inception (or perhaps inCeptioN), which revolves around the surreptitious “planting” of an idea into someone’s brain, should itself be the fruit of Nolan taking various “seeds” from Dick, Ruben, Cronenberg and company, and combining them with his own predilections and fancies – with admittedly spectacular results.
   It’s simply bad timing, then, that it should appear on our screens so soon after Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island - both films starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a man moving between various levels of “reality”, and being “haunted” by the spectre of his deceased wife: here Marion Cotillard’s ‘Mal’, who keeps cropping up in disruptive and destructive fashion during the various levels of the dreams like a more alluring version of Jody from Dick’s Ubik.
   To be fair, Nolan does add certain concepts and flourishes entirely his own – some of them niftily brilliant, such as the fact that his dreamers can fall asleep inside their dreams, and thus “descend” to another level of dreaming, with compounded temporal effects so that a few minutes in reality can expand almost infinitely once the dreamer has passed down through several strata of their subconscious.
   Perhaps his greatest achievement is to stage action on several of these levels simultaneously, editor Lee Smith deserving considerable credit for cutting between the various zones in a manner which only occasionally strays over into incomprehensibility. Indeed, this often goes hand-in-hand with sequences of grand, giddy euphoria – Wally Pfister’s cinematography and Hans Zimmer’s pleasingly portentous horn-heavy score demand the biggest of screens, and the most enveloping of sound-systems.
   But the special effects, eye-popping though they are (who needs 3D anyway?), can only get us part of the way – indeed, it’s notable that the most convincingly “dream like” moment is so very humdrum, a throwaway bit where Leo (in “reality”) is being chased through a dusty north African city and has to squeeze himself through an unfeasibly narrow gap between two buildings.
   And while the central plot strands aren’t perhaps the most engrossing – DiCaprio struggling to come to terms with Cotillard’s death; the corporate espionage shenanigans that give him a last shot at redemption – supporting players Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy (as members of DiCaprio’s dream-intervention squad) provide much needed moments of humour and old-fashioned human interaction, standing out in an ensemble that’s conspicuously laden with Oscar winners and nominees.
   Gordon-Levitt’s wry performance is mostly a matter of gymnastics and acrobatics, as he spends most of his time bouncing weightlessly through hotel corridors and lift-shafts, or engaging in gravity-defying fisticuffs with various faceless henchmen. But he occasionally comes down to earth, flirting/sparring (“you mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling”) with Hardy’s outrageously charismatic “forger” – the latter all blocky blokiness in boxy 1950s suits, retro-kitsch shirts and slicked-down side-parted hair, exuding the insouciant, experience-roughened swagger of a chap who’s just wandered in from a Graham Greene novel (Vern sums up the character as a dandy badass master of disguise.)
   It’s such details that keep the picture so watchable through a hefty two-and-half-hour running-time, as Inception pulls off the tricky balancing-act of appealing to the viscera and the intellect, right up until the gasp-inducing, audacious ambiguity of the final cut to black (not quite as “cheaty” as John Sayles’ Limbo [1999], but in the same ballpark). Not for nothing is that last image one of a spinning top, revolving so rapidly on its axis that – just like the movie itself – it stays upright, keeps on going, through sheer centrifugal force of will.

  
.   Following   .

We seek conceptual rigour and unexpected beauty, intensity & articulation, richness & meaning. We work with the performance of the body in space, confronting the limits of its own freedom; with the ambiguous, alluring and terrifying role of surveillance in our contemporary data world; with the primacy of ephemeral and ambient systems and effects; with the choreography of optical space; with the kind of shit that we think matters….

   No, this isn’t the latest film-making manifesto/mission-statement from “visionary” director Christopher Nolan – though it does sound like the kind of thing the man behind Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight and Inception might dream up.
   In fact it’s from the website of cutting-edge London-based architecture firm ‘atmos’, run by Alex Haw – charismatic star of Nolan’s debut feature as writer-director, Following. Architecture’s gain was cinema’s loss: this remains Haw’s sole acting credit, placing him in a select category of adult ‘performers’ who made a significant impact in their only movie*.
   Like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, Haw is sharp-suited whenever he’s on screen – and it’s obviously no coincidence that both characters share the surname ‘Cobb.’ But whereas Leo’s Dom Cobb is prey to external shenanigans and his own mental torments, Haw’s Cobb (too cool to have a first name) is very much in control: something of a Machiavellian / Mephistophelean puppet-master, in fact. A combination of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley and Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, he struts the streets of late-nineties London with the imperious, prolix yuppie hauteur of a know-all underworld-probing Peter York (“London’s full of these dead spaces.”)
   Strictly speaking Cobb is the secondary role here – Nolan’s main focus is on an unnamed thirtyish would-be writer (Jeremy Theobald), who starts “shadowing” passers-by to gain material for his long-in-development novel. But as soon as he latches onto Cobb, quickly being drawn into the latter’s web of theft, deception and existential provocation (“you take it away, and show them what they had”), it’s plain that the devil is going to have all the best tunes – the main question being to what degree the writer is going to be Cobb’s apprentice, acolyte or patsy.
   A hint is provided when the third main character appears – also unnamed, identified in the end-credits only as The Blonde, and played by Lucy Russell with smoulderingly ambiguous, old-school femme fatale glamour. No surprise that Russell went on to reap considerable acclaim in Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001) – she continues to pop up in films and TV – because if one was forced to pick the most promising elements out of Following, it would be the contributions of Haw and Russell. Theobald, like his character, seems a bit out of his depth – he makes for a rather drab hero, though this is surely part of Nolan’s design.
   As for the writer-director, Following now looks like a moderately encouraging calling-card. Already certain key Nolan preoccupations are evident – not least the twisty, time-hopping, cross-and-double-cross plot-structure – but here it’s very much a classic case of style over substance, with what’s ultimately revealed as an implausible and wildly over-complicated story dressed up with various retro visual affectations.
   Harking self-consciously back to 1950s noirs and early-60s nouvelle vague, the grainy black-and-white cinematography (by Nolan himself – he also shared editing duties with Gareth Heal) more often looks like out-takes from some forgotten mid-80s pop-video or Blitz magazine photo-shoot. As an exploration of the medium, and of script construction – not to mention working with actors – it was clearly a crucial element in Nolan’s learning-curve.
   But, looking back, there’s not that much here to elevate Following above the general run of scrappy no-budget debuts – and Nolan was fortunate to obtain theatrical distribution for a picture that runs a mere 69 minutes, plus a Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival**. There’s little here to suggest the massive leap forward in terms of ambition and execution that he would achieve so soon after with Memento (2000), or the current semi-divine cinematic status he enjoys in certain quarters, post-Inception, another ten years on.

Neil Young
26th July 2010

:    FOLLOWING   : [5/10] : UK 1998 : Christopher NOLAN : 70m (BBFC – theatrical release) : DVD, Sunderland, 18th July : {14/28}
:    INCEPTION   : [7/10] : USA 2010 : Christopher NOLAN : 148m (BBFC) : Cineworld, Boldon, 18th July (£7.00) : {20/28}

* Other notable examples include Jean Shrimpton (Privilege, 1967), Klinton Spilsbury (The Legend of the Lone Ranger, 1981), Graham Greene (Day for Night, 1973), Emmanuel Schotté (L’humanité, 1999), Nadine Nortier (Mouchette, 1967), Carlo Battisti (Umberto D, 1952), Leslie Marlowe (She-Man, 1967), Ben Lee (The Rage in Placid Lake, 2003) and Boris Vlasov (First on the Moon, 2005).

** The Dutch event hands out three of these each year, and since 1995 there have been 49 Tiger winners (four were given in 2007). Of the 49, only three have been British: Following, Gillies McKinnon’s slick Small Faces (1996) and Patrick Keiller’s masterpiece Robinson In Space (1997). The only time Following comes close to Keiller’s level, by the way, is the very last, casually enigmatic frame — don’t blink.

The Films of Christopher Nolan
Following (1998) [5/10]
Memento (2000) [9/10]
Insomnia (2002) [6/10]
Batman Begins (2005) [7/10]
The Prestige (2006) [6/10]
The Dark Knight (2008) [6/10]
Inception (2010) [7/10]

—–Original Message—–
From: Neil Young [mailto:neil@bolar.demon.co.uk]
Sent: 20 July 2010 12:23
To: NVG
Subject: paint yr wagon

I paid to see Inception with a big multiplex crowd on Sunday evening and it worked a treat. It was very much a popcorn audience and they were a bit noisy at first. I thought they would have problems following it all (I did!) but at the end there was this big gasp of delighted frustration when it cuts to black on the spinning top (the like of which I haven’t heard in a cinema since John Sayles’ Limbo a decade ago), so it clearly did what it was supposed to do.
   American reviews have been largely very positive – he’s become a kind of “New Kubrick” for some of them over there. British ones have been largely negative, with quite a few outright pans (* out of 5 in The Independent – “puny”). It was similar with The Dark Knight — the Americans (public and critics) raved about it, Brits were more measured.
   Personally I think it’s his 2nd best film – after Memento – and while it doesn’t all come off (probably an inevitable result of “dreaming a little bigger, darling”) it manages to be a “brainy thriller” that delivers in terms of excitement (with giddy euphoria at certain sections) and also in terms of ideas (the compounded time-difference among the different layers is a brilliant touch.)
   Performance-wise, I thought Hardy and Gordon-Levitt stole it — very good in themselves, and even better when they were sparking off each other. Everyone else was more “functional”, and for Leo it was much too soon after Shutter Island (more moping around with the “ghost” of a dead wife, etc.)