anyone who reads my opinion of this movie is going to think i'm deliberately perverse. and i guess that would be one way to explain it. i like the wolfman. i hate avatar. i like zombie strippers. i hate love actually. anything good and/or popular, i hate; anything bad and/or unpopular, i love. i don't intend it to be thus, but that does seem to be how it works.
so is it any surprise that i didn't like inception, and felt like the entire movie was one long experience of being kicked in the senses?
the sensation that comes closest is that of being forced to watch anne of a thousand days in ninth grade history. no escape. just you, the entire class, and a bunch of greasy, fake fur-wearing '70's actors yelling at each other from the depths of their method training, and then an interlude, in which someone watches someone else from a window and the soundtrack features a lute. and then the screaming. and then the headache-inducing plot happening. and some messenger in tights brings a scroll of parchment and the plotting nobleman speaks lowly to himself in a wonderfully sonorous voice. more lute, and then a lifelike party scene in which more greasy '70's actors carouse by yelling, and then the king fondles some strawberry blonde while listening to another message delivered by another messenger in tights. and meanwhile, on the beach, some people yell at each other. and then more lute. and then someone recounts a memory from childhood. and then there is sexual tension with a less greasy '70's man with slightly better hair than the rest of them. and by the time the third class period-worth of watching this rolls around, you actually jump out of your seat and yell "CHOP OFF HER GODDAMN HEAD ALREADY!!!" and THAT's why you don't get a date for winter formal. or so you tell yourself.*
but i digress. like, a lot.
okay, here's the thing. dark knight? worked--so worked. why? because the emotional center was there there there. it went beyond words. it affected us. it affected us, because emotion is always a little bit like a secret, one of those secrets left in plain sight, like a scar from a wound. there is a reason behind it, and the reason is simple. now, as the audience, we don't have to know the reason behind the secret--what makes the scar a memento of a secret, as opposed to just a bodily mark. heath as the joker, with his nineteeen thousand origin stories, worked because there was one thing that tied him together. we didn't know what it was--it wasn't put into words, or not words that we could trust. but it didn't have to be, because it was fully present in every aspect of the performance. the scar evinced by his face was firmly tied to a reason for its existence, and that reason was powerful enough to make its evasion of words possible.
in inception, i would argue, this is not the case. there is a secret involving his wife and kids and possibly his father (ah, spoilers, ought i to employ you? i guess not)--a secret that drives the plot, one that may or may not be revealed at the end. but it's not a good secret--it doesn't provide enough motivation for the film itself. maybe there's something i haven't guessed about inception--some clue that i didn't catch. but it doesn't matter, as i've said, whether or not one knows the secret. what matters is whether or not the secret provides a powerful enough reason to make a plot worth sitting through.
i'm going to call it the blade runner phenomenon. it's not that there was no rhyme or reason to blade runner, it's just that a person (well, i) didn't care enough to try and figure out what said rhyme and reason were. and this might be my fault, but i think it had a lot to do with the fact that the film didn't give me much to work with. lots and lots of cool ideas, interesting visuals and hommages, but the connecting secret wasn't there--wasn't where it was supposed to be.
now, outside of this critique i could rave about inception. i'm not going to, because as awesome as the plots were, and as beautiful as the filmic world was, it all became a lot of bombastic nonsense due to the fact that there was no center. the center was supposed to be the romance between leonardo and his wife, but it didn't play. it had a lot going for it, but it didn't tie together, because it had nothing to tie around. and this unravelling, to use an inception-like metaphor, spread, and turned the really cool plot into something like a magic eye picture without the hidden picture.
the performances were brilliant. seriously, the acting was incredible. the look of the movie was amazing. the plot, as i've said, was nearly there. but when something comes that close, it only ends up being worse when it fails. at the 15 minute mark, we all were pretty damn sure we knew what the underlying plot twist of the movie was. we then spent 2 hours and 45 minutes waiting to find out if we were right. whatever we found out or not is unimportant. what's important is that those 2 hours and 45 minutes didn't contribute enough satisfaction to the end reveal to make the stomach-twisting suspense, confusing (though wildly interesting) plot, or delicately and sympathetically conveyed characterization worth the involvement of energy that they demanded. and that is a sin.
because it was a really good movie. i just couldn't stand it. it was really really well done. i just couldn't believe that it had betrayed me--not with its twist, but with its lack of meaning. nolan knows how to mean, we've seen that in the dark knight. next on the list is to figure out what it means to mean. i know i sound crazy, but meaning isn't something that you can choose. it is other than manipulatable. the meaning of his movie was there--i know that, because of how good it was--but nolan missed it, because he was too busy creating to listen.
sorry. this is pretty out there. god knows i don't hear meaning the way i want to most of the time. but that's my proscription for nolan's next movie, anyway: listen. figure it out. make it happen. you can do it.
i don't know crap.
*having a liz lemon moment here.
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