Sleeping on the Job

The chief characteristic of Christopher Nolan's films is compulsion.

Its' not that we care so much about Leonard's mission to avenge his wife in Memento, it's that the intense Guy Pearce plays it with such obsessive persistence that we can't stop watching, mesmerised.

Logically, Leonard's means of reminding himself to remember is flawed, for how can he remember to remember? What if he forgets what all those tattoos are all about?

Then there's the Draculian Will Dormer in Insomnia, obsessively trying to keep the light out of his hotel room so that he can get that one thing we all must have. Sleep. He is also trying, of course, to keep out the truth of his mendacity.

Played by the obsessive Al Pacino, the rest of the film is so well made that we forgive the flawed, though inspired, casting of another obsessive-compulsive, Robin Williams, as the killer. It is also the only Nolan film in which a woman, played by the great Hilary Swank, actually has a memorable character arc.

There are competing magicians - another obsessive pastime - in The Prestige, starring two more obsessives, Edward Norton and Christian Bale.

But there are no flaws in Dark Knight, a comic-based masterpiece starring, yet again, the mild-mannered Bale. Like so many others he comes completely into his own with that paradoxical aid to authenticity: the mask.

This led to Nolan being able to make his latest film, a $160-million mind fuck that Warner Brothers felt warranted another $100-million worth of marketing. Okay, so it stars Leonardo diCaprio as Cobb, another obsessive who never quite cracks the romantic lead, but that's another story.

What exactly, though, is Inception about? Well, Cobb knows how to enter people's subconscious and then extract information from them. Most of that data is corporate, but Cobb has got himself into so much personal trouble that he can't get back to the United States to be with the only real thing that matters to him - his children.

But he has one more chance at redemption and that's by planting an idea - the most dangerous thing you can do short of pulling a trigger - much as he did with his late wife, played by Marion Cotillard. Obsessively driven by guilt, all manner of things happen, ranging from trucks full of men ending up in high-speed chases with all but the driver asleep (this is dreamtime, you understand) to James Bond-like adventures in the snow (ditto).

All very well, but count how many times the word "dream" is used and the concept explained, and wonder why the CEO of the targeted corp is called Robert Fischer Jr. Does it have anything to do with chess (this from an obsessive chess nut) because it should, since Ariadne (the boyishly built Ellen Page) chooses a pawn as her totem (Nolan is big on those too) to remind her when she's back in reality.

Does the chess allusion refer to a game of rigid rules, 32 players and 64 squares, which can lead to infinite possibilities? Perhaps, but if those are the only references they seem a little gratuitous. And we should care about Fischer Jr's hangups about his squillionaire father, why? Because Cillian Murphy happens to look good in a bespoke suit?

Does Ariadne provide the golden thread for Cobb's fallen Theseus to slay the Minotaurean corp and get what he needs and wants, his children? Maybe, but they never fall in love as those two did. Fair enough; they don't necessarily have to. But then she just sort of disappears at the end, which is not exactly satisfactory, either.

Truth is, we don't get to know much about her or the late Mrs Cobb - or most of Nolan's other women characters.

But maybe the problem in this work of magnificent Escher-like constructions is a very old fashioned one. Maybe we just don't care enough about someone who doesn't seem to have any moral or metaphysical problems with stealing from and killing for faceless corporations. In other words, where's Cobb's real fall, his real redemption?

Neil Sonnekus

* Films more elegant and economic in the way that they use the ultra-manipulative medium of film to lead us up the garden path of time and reality are eXistenZ by David Cronenburg and Jacob's Ladder by Adrian Lyne.

** The picture above is not from Inception but a reflection of the Auckland tower, taken with my cellphone with its nifty little Zeiss lens. I don't have permission to use stills from the film.