100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #81: Inception (2010)

Written & Directed by Christopher Nolan

Inception stands at a unique place in recent film history: it’s pre-Avengers, meaning it was produced during a time when franchises- at least successful ones- really weren’t as much of a thing, sans Harry Potter. It was also produced right before Joe Biden opened up the China box office floodgates and every studio realized they could make a fortune as long as their films were allowed to release in China. One could say that Inception stands as one of the last pure Hollywood blockbusters, unencumbered by the weight of having to set up sequels and given a pretty magnanimous budget of close to $200 million. However, even in 2010, the tide was already shifting, comparing the top 10 highest grossing films of 2010 to 2009:

It’s surprising to see films like the Dan Brown adaptation Angels & Demons and The Hangover up there with Avatar and Harry Potter. By the time Inception released though, live-action IP plays were becoming the thing, although thankfully animation at least was still original compared to the constant churn of sequels we get now.

This is all to say that, while The Dark Knight obviously secured director Christopher Nolan’s place as a proven moneymaker, it was Inception that proved that he was a certified phenomenon: he took Warner Bros’ blank check and ran away with it, becoming the single most powerful director in Hollywood. Inception may be the best Christopher Nolan film to date (although The Prestige makes that call pretty hard), it’s a film that for over a decade now has confounded and amazed audiences who seek to know the truth of the film’s intentionally puzzling ending.

Despite the labyrinthine plot structure and vast array of characters, the film’s conceit, revolved around Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb (a name borrowed from Nolan’s own debut, Following), is about a man who just wants one thing: to be reunited with his family. But he is torn between the real world (where his children are) and the dream world that he learned to inhabit with his late wife, Mal, through the technology of “dream-sharing”. This inhabiting of two worlds caused his wife to go crazy, resulting in her tragic death, the wrongful implication of Cobb in her death, and the subsequent restraining order against seeing his children. The only way to get back to his children is to pull off an “inception” job for a Japanese businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), who is powerful enough to potentially clear Cobb’s criminal status, allowing him to return home in America. The job, using the same “dream-sharing” technology he had experimented with before, consists of planting an idea into the head of the heir of Saito’s business rival, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy in one of his many Nolan film roles), to get him to dissolve the company belonging to his late father Maurice (Pete Postlethwaite in one of his last roles).

In order to pull of this heist, Cobb assembles a team of professionals, all with unique roles in the job. First, there is his Point Man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who plans and provides the direction of each job. Then there is Ariadne (Ellen Page), the Architect of the mazes that will form the dreams themselves. The last two are Eames (Tom Hardy) as the Forger, who can impersonate anyone in the dream-realm, and Yusuf (Dileep Rao) as the Chemist, who creates the special drugs required to sedate the sleepers and allow them to share dreams. Each must work together in order to secure Cobb’s vision and to successfully plant an idea so that when Fischer wakes up, he will immediately want to dissolve his father’s empire.

As Nolan himself has said, each of these roles equate to the roles of a filmmaking crew:

Cobb = The Director

Arthur = The Producer

Ariadne = The Production Designer

Eames = The Actor(s)

Yusuf = Special Effects

Saito = The Studio

Last but not least, Fischer, the man whose mind they are infiltrating, represents us: the audience. For what is filmmaking- what is art- but an effective means of planting ideas within the recipient? Within his heist film, Nolan implants ideas about grief, family, and consciousness that stick with us long after we “wake up” from the Inception dream. Just as there are many levels to the dreamscape that Cobb dreams up, so there are many levels to this film.

One such example of such an interpretation is that this is a film about how much Christopher Nolan misses his family when he is gone on long shoots. Just before this film, the director had embarked on a 123 day shoot for The Dark Knight, during which his wife and producer Emma Thomas became pregnant with their fourth child, as Nolan reflects in an interview for Tom Shone’s book The Nolan Variations:

The family were around for an enormous amount of the film, but Emma was pregnant with Magnus at the time. The last two months, I think, I was in England, finishing the film, and they had to be back here. I was able to be present for Magnus’s birth; I flew over, but I had to go right back to England and carry on the film. I spent about two months there. To this day, I think that’s the longest I’ve been away from them for…I think that’s the experience that crystallized that aspect of Inception- the call that Cobb has to his kids, trying to talk to them on the phone, the sand castles on the beach.¹

Essentially from Memento through The Dark Knight, Nolan had been continuously busy for an entire decade, and after The Dark Knight Rises he has consistently taken at least three years between each of his films rather than the typical studio-mandated two. While this is definitely in part to give himself ample time for writing and pre-production- a luxury that most filmmakers would kill for- I believe it is also so that he can spend time with his family once a shoot is completed.

Nolan’s Inception is the perfect blend of high-concept, Bond-level antics with a deeply personal, emotional story crafted by both Nolan and DiCaprio, the latter of whom did some work on the script strengthening his character. It’s no secret that both director and star lead look quite physically alike, much like Nolan utilizing fellow British filmmaker Kenneth Branagh in surrogate roles in his later career with Dunkirk and Tenet. Subsequent films have also touched upon similar themes of longing for home, especially with Interstellar in which a man leaves his children for years to try to save the world and ends up missing them growing up. Nolan has carved out a very special place in the filmmaking world where he can balance his family and craft, a virtuous tightrope act that sets him apart from many of his contemporaries.

Lest he wind up “an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone”.

(above) Nolan and his daughter Flora in 2003. (below) Robert Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy) cherished childhood photo of him playing with a pinwheel with his father from the film.

1. Shone, 206-207