Beautiful Dreamer With Layers On layers

    Writer/director Christopher Nolan’s ambitious science fiction movie, “Inception,â€� contains all his conceits, tropes and strengths. But where his breakthrough “Mementoâ€� — and “Batman Returnsâ€� and “The Dark Knightâ€�— were nearly hermetic in their self-seriousness, “Inceptionâ€� is more open and airy, as you might expect in a film about dreams.

   But what you might expect and what you get are quite different.  Dreams in Nolan’s world are not happy or spiritual or transcendent.  But they are beautiful.

   “Inceptionâ€� is about a mostly corporate espionage agent, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), trained to extract secrets from a target’s mind. Now, in order to get home to the United States (you’ll find out why he lives abroad) he takes an assignment from Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea instead of stealing one, in a process called “inception.â€� The target is Saito’s competitor’s heir, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy).

     Cobb assembles a crack team of dream masters:  a number two, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); a forger (Tom Hardy); a chemist (Dileep Rao); and a young architect named Ariadne (Ellen Page).

    As Page is introduced to dream manipulation in the first part of the movie, she serves as our proxy to (sort of) understand Nolan’s convoluted ideas.

   The cast brings a taut, cynical yet wondering presence to the enterprise.  DiCaprio and Page are serious and focused, Hardy Continued from page 11

wise-cracking and sarcastic, Gordon-Levitt nerdy and easily needled by Hardy’s one-liners.  (Accept that lively dialogue is not a Nolan strength; these moments of levity are almost unique in his work.)

   As Nolan’s mind game plays out, layer on layer like 3D chess (the Fischer name must be a sly reference to the great chess champion), we meet perhaps the movie’s most compelling character — and certainly its most beautiful — Mal, pronounced “Mollâ€� and played by the stunning Marion Cotillard, of “La Vie en Rose.â€� (Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rienâ€� is Nolan’s musical icon in the film.)  She is Cobb’s dead — or is she? —wife, the movie’s Morgan Le Fay and the reason Cobb can’t go home to the U.S.

   The film begins to unfold in  time warps, complex meanings and incredibly beautiful set pieces, just as dreams do. And the set pieces can be thrilling, shifting from location to location seamlessly and bending time between the dreamers and their selves in their dreams.

   Oh, how complicated and pretentious this sounds. But if you just let the movie wash over you like the great ocean wave that opens it, you will find — maybe halfway through — that you begin to know which dream layer is before you.  And when Nolan is manipulating real time versus dream time.

   The basic story line of “Inceptionâ€� — an “Ocean’s Elevenâ€� band on a caper — isn’t original.  Nor is playing with dreams in film. (Think Cocteau, Renoir and Kubrick.) But Nolan’s conception is so complex and so beautiful that it can stun you one minute (the de rigueur chase, but on skis; the zero-gravity combat)  and ravish you the next (wait until you see Cobb and Mal walking in their dreamscape.) “Inceptionâ€� is one terrific cinematic ride.

     The film is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout. (People do get shot, but the violence isn’t especially bloody; and I’ll bet teenagers raised on video games “getâ€� Nolan’s dream layers sooner than adults.)

   It is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and the Triplex in Great Barrington, MA.