The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Christopher Nolan's Batman films have seriously, sometimes ponderously, probed the ramifications of superheroes in the "real" world. Batman Begins used its rusted, humid underworld as a petri dish for urban bacteria into which its hero was injected like a test cure. The Dark Knight followed up on the consequences of that hero's success, replacing the low-level scum with a bigger, badder force that wreaked such havoc as a direct result of Batman's presence that one was left to wonder whether his presence made life for the people better or worse. The Dark Knight Rises inverts that thematic dynamic to explore what happens in the hero's absence.

TDKR picks up eight years to the day after the conclusion of The Dark Knight. On the anniversary of Harvey Dent's death, the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) holds a commemoration that flaunts the aggressive clean-up campaign waged in the late district attorney's name, one that has, apparently, rid the city of organized crime. As the mayor, then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) give their speeches, a shadow watches from above. Not the shadow of a bat, but a man, and a broken one at that, the silhouette of a cane and the bent shadow of the person holding it suggesting not Batman's imposing, fearful, symbolic strength but just a hobbled man. Such has become Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), deteriorated physically from the strain of his days as Batman and mentally from the trauma of losing the friend in whom he believed and the woman he loved. But as another character tells Wayne not too long after, "There's a storm coming," one that will require the man to become a legend once more and handle a greater evil than ever before.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)

The opening shots of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris show the titular city from the perspective of a tourist, focusing on landmarks as tour groups walk and ride ferries around town. Occasionally, he spares brief glimpses of back alleys occupied by locals who know how to avoid the shuffling guests. Meanwhile, Allen lays French-flavored jazz, a Parisien take on American music, over such shots. He even literalizes the other part of the title by spreading the montage over the course of a day from sunrise to starless night, watching the blossom of the City of Light as dim interior lights grow into the full dazzle of Paris after dark. Despite the simplicity of Allen's static montage, he conveys a number of important ideas with the first moments: we do not see the Paris of those who live there but of tourists who visit it, and the sight of centuries-old landmarks looming over modern urban bustle shows the past mingling with the present.

That juxtaposition magnifies as Allen follows Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful hack screenwriter who looks to Paris for inspiration for his novel. Drunkenly wandering Paris one night while his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) dances with friends, Gil suddenly finds himself sucked into an old car after midnight, ending up amongst flappers, ex-pats and, most importantly, a host of legendary artists who dwelt in the city in the 1920s.

Inception

In Christopher Nolan's previous non-Batman film, The Prestige, Robert Angier says at one point that man's "reach exceeds his imagination" in response to Nikola Tesla's bitter contention that our grasp exceeds our nerve. Tesla, a genius buried for decades in the history books by the inventors who stole from him and led lives of great fame, fell in the estimation of his peers due to his eccentric beliefs about scientific possibility. He proposed ideas that people could not bring themselves to contemplate, and soon he went from being one of the most notable engineers of his day to a footnote to be dug up by the faithful. To him, man's problem was not that science went too far but that it did not go far enough, and the primitive superstition and ignorance of the world hindered us as a species.

Angier's modified quote gets at something else, an idea that could stand for Nolan's ethos as a filmmaker. For the magician, Tesla's genius proves that the world is so complicated and full of potential that what sets us back is an inability to process the grand complexity of the universe. With six prior films, Nolan, the most ambitious mainstream filmmaker of his day, has pursued this idea through art. Where other A-list blockbuster filmmakers content themselves to churn out stale, formulated pictures that push just enough buttons to earn a big opening weekend (which is all that matter anymore), Nolan has ideas. To be fair, thus far his reach has indeed exceeded his grasp: The Prestige was a visual tour-de-force and an atmospheric delight, but I've yet to determine whether I find it a convincing examination of obsessive rivalry or simply a top-notch con job, a question I seek to answer for myself soon when I re-examine the film. Batman Begins, while an improvement over the previous franchise films, spent far too much time with its exposition and shot itself in the foot at the end by undermining Nolan's attempt to add semi-realistic verisimilitude to the franchise with a microwave gun and a shocking level of collateral damage. Even The Dark Knight, easily the finest and most ambitious Hollywood epic since the final Lord of the Rings film, lost itself in its politics, conjuring numerous allusions to the War on Terror but leaving a question in everyone's mind whether it was really condemning Bush's policies or supporting them (both sides must omit certain sections of the film to support their points of view.) Despite his drive and his desire to do something will all the money entrusted to him, Nolan has always typically retained his most incisive work for his more intimate films, not capturing the same verve with his blockbusters.

Until now.


Inception will not convert those opposed to Nolan's style, and, despite the raving of the Rotten Tomatoes users over the effrontery necessary to dislike one of the director's films, this does not make them Philistines nor trolls. I sympathize with the complaint registered that a director as literal and detail-obsessed as Nolan is not the ideal candidate for making a movie about dreams. Indeed, for all of the film's twists and turns that lead dream worlds to crumble and distort, Inception only fleetingly taps into an oneiric mood, and the film never takes on an ephemeral tone even in the sustained build-up of the last hour.

Instead, Nolan does essentially what he did with the Batman films: he takes a subject that is inherently fantastical and roots it in a straightforward, crisp aesthetic of semi-realism. While this stylistic choice does not reflect the true nature of dreams, it allows Nolan to take the heist film to a new realm. With Inception, Nolan steps out of the shadow of his biggest aesthetic influence, Michael Mann, to make a heist thriller without boundaries, one that extends to the realm of science fiction and, more surprisingly, the first convincing romantic story of Nolan's career.

Wasting no time attempting to ease the audience into the film, Nolan opens with Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an Extractor, attempting to steal information from a businessman's mind on behalf of a rival corporation. Just as the audience gets a handle on which scenario is a dream and which is reality, the director kicks the chair out from under us, revealing the initial dream to be a dream within a dream and the supposed reality merely the first layer of a dream. Yeah, it's gonna be that kind of movie. Once everyone wakes up for real, we know that the mission has been bungled though the nature and purpose of that mission remains just out of reach. Dom viciously berates one of the members of his team, the "architect" Nash, for slipping up in designing the target's dream world, thus giving the man the opportunity to deduce that he was dreaming and wake himself. The businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), reveals then that he was actually testing Dom and his crew and that, save for the architect whose failure will get all their names on the rival company's hit list, he admires their work.

Saito then gives them a new job, one that could clear everyone's name and allow the exiled Dom to return to the United States. Just as the other company hired the Extractors to steal information from Saito, so too does the man want the team to infiltrate another rival, the son of a dying energy tycoon, not to steal an idea but implant one. Dom's crew say that such an act, the titular inception, cannot be done, that the brain can always trace the root of an idea and it will know that it received a planted suggestion from an outside source. Cobb, however, believes he can pull it off, and he sets out to replace his lost architect and plan a heist that makes the complexities of the Ocean's movies look as difficult as stealing a piggy bank.

One of Nolan's key flaws as a director is that neither he nor his frequent editor, Lee Smith, have the instincts to know when to cut a scene or produce a neatly flowing document. The Dark Knight's editing left some scenes so unresolved that the film screeches to a halt in two or three places. Here, however, the scattershot editing works in the film's favor. As Dom tells Ariadne (Ellen Page), the gifted college grad student he hires as the new architect, dreams have no concrete beginning or end; we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a situation, never thinking about how we got there. Thus, Nolan's habit of simply dropping into shots works to the film's benefit, helping the jumping narrative blend dream with reality even more convincingly.

Likewise, Nolan's clunky, expository dialogue, which makes up most of the script's lines, does not bog down the film but provide a much needed anchor as the director takes us into deeper and deeper layers of the subconscious. Dom's point man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is always explaining, but that's his job: he does the research, calculates the times, and synchronizes the layers of the dream, so he must carefully go over the details. Ariadne needs vivid descriptions of places to recreate them in the minds of others. Even Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger whose talents of fake identity in the real world allow him to actually take the appearance and voice of others in dreams, needs to know the character of his impersonations. On a psychological level, the further these characters travel, the more even they cannot suss out what is imagined and what is real, and their thick dialogue becomes their only tether back to sanity.


Thankfully, the detailed speech does not extend to Nolan's literal-minded dream state. We learn the "rules" quickly: any pain experienced in dreams is genuinely felt because the brain processes the nerve responses, but those who die simply wake up. In order to pull off the inception, however, the target, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), and the team must be sedated for hours, necessitating a sedative so strong that anyone who dies will not wake up but enter into a limbo state that, due to the temporal state of dreams (which slows exponentially the deeper one ventures), could last decades before dumping a psychologically destroyed person back into the real world where only a few hours have passed. Why any of this is is rightly not explained, because how could one ever provide a sufficient reason?

While the dialogue does gunk up the film in a few places, Nolan counterbalances any potential issue with a rich narrative. Without losing sight of the heist story, the director splits focus to show the dangers of burying into one's mind. Those who enter the dreams of another can manipulate the world, but the subconscious recognizes shifts and projections of people slowly gather around foreign bodies as if white blood cells targeting potential contagions. The more one subdivides the dream state, the more unstable and unpredictable the subconscious becomes.

This is most evident not in Fischer, who has trained himself to withstand Extractors and marshals an army to defend his thoughts, but Dom. Like Michael Mann, Nolan cares for the dichotomy between good guy and bad guy, from the rival magicians in The Prestige to, of course, the fine line that separates Batman from the Joker. But Inception features no villain, nor, to be honest, anyone of heroic action; even Saito bears no animosity for Fischer, and wants only to break up his father's energy empire to prevent a corporate superpower from forming. (In fact, the father issues Fischer confronts in his dreams make for surprisingly touching material.) But lingering feelings of regret and guilt cloud Dom's mind, made corporeal in the dream world in the form of a projection of his wife Mallorie (Marion Cotillard).

Like the vision of the protagonist's wife in Solaris only much, much darker, "Mal" filters in and out of the picture, tormenting Cobb and actively fighting against the team's goals as she becomes his demons. The idea that protagonist and antagonist are merely flip sides of the same person is therefore literalized, with Cobb forced to fight himself in the form of the person he loves more than anything. The fragments of happier times, or seemingly happier times, that Nolan intercuts into the film gradually morph from bewildering shock cuts into devastating snatches of a horrific situation. It's an evolution that relies on direction and acting to sell, and while Nolan cannot match Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio takes the similar unfolding of a doomed, half-imagined free-fall of a relationship that he captured in Shutter Island to another level. Never has DiCaprio given a performance this good; in this film, he plays a man who knows that he's slipping into madness and putting on a brave face anyway. When a Newsweek writer, the same one who wrote about how awkward he thought it was to watch gay actors play straight roles, typed up his latest grab-bag of embarrassing nonsense about how DiCaprio never smiles anymore in his movies (no, seriously), perhaps he was so focused on making an ass out himself yet again not to consider that Dom is doing good not to break down screaming, much less put on a happy face.

Of course, the biggest issue with Nolan's previous attempts to ape Mann on some level is that the Brit cannot effectively work in Mann's milieu. He gets lost when he gets himself in too deep, and "too deep" is where Mann starts. With Inception, Nolan turns to a different, equally precise director for guidance, Stanley Kubrick. Now, as great a director as Mann is, he, and everyone else, is no Kubrick, so if Nolan couldn't match his first hero, he certainly couldn't do so with Stan. Yet Kubrick's style hedges closer to the kind that Nolan has shaped for himself. Like Nolan (and unlike Mann), Kubrick is removed from the action, gazing from afar to collect all the details. Not nearly as detached as the American ex-pat, Nolan is also not as sweeping and holistic, and where Kubrick stood back to survey like a general, Nolan just wants to clear his head enough to get a handle on things. Amazingly, he finally does so with his most twisted, Byzantine film yet. By stepping out of the fracas, he paradoxically manages to travel deeper than ever before into the thick of his gnarled vision and not get lost.

Appropriate to Nolan's left-brained vision, the Kubrick influence can be most readily seen in literal form. Nolan takes from the director the setpiece that allowed his character to seemingly walk upside down and float in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan uses the old school setup with a few digital touches for a thrilling fight in a hotel hallway as the movement of people in one state alters the gravity of the entire world of another. The long hallway itself could be a vague reference to The Shining, but the execution is all Nolan and the second-most exciting thing he's directed since he flipped a semi.


Nolan has never made a perfect film, and he doesn't start here. Even for a film about dreams, some plot-holes crop of when some aspects of certain dreams don't jive with the rules we've been given. Too, a few expository scenes are simply too weighty with lines, especially one where Page's character, only just introduced to the fold, starts asking extremely personal questions about Dom's life and demanding answers from him that heap on the plot and backstory. But there's something dull about perfection anyway, hermetic and removed. Pauline Kael once wrote, "Great films are rarely perfect films" and, with a few exceptions (Citizen Kane, nearly all the upper tier of Kubrick's filmography), I'd rather watch a film made a few missteps while reaching for something that pull back just to ensure immaculate design of a lesser movie. However much Nolan might fail to meet the goals he sets for himself in most of his movies, he still reaches, goddammit, and that means something these days.

But let us not worry about whether Inception is a masterpiece, for to do so would only fuel a hype machine already barreling out of control. Greatness only comes when a work of art sits in the mind long enough to take full root, and the constant search for modern masterpieces is less important than finding the movies that really grab you. For what it's worth, I would not likely consider Inception a masterpiece, as it has little to say about the human condition, or even the nature of dreams. But it's proof that even the maker of the third-highest grossing film of all time can still go on to make his breakthrough.

A hodgepodge of inspirations as much as the director's other films, Inception jumbles together a variety of genres, philosophies and artistic influences.The complexity of the film's sources may be lost on some, like Patrick Goldstein, who mocked a review, a positive one no less, for referencing both Jung (which is pretty standard in a film about dreams, no?) and the classic French heist film Rififi. Goldstein's rant devolved so quickly into hysterics and a desperate plea for critics to maybe know a little less about their subjects so that they might reflect the common man that I suspect he invited some members of the Rotten Tomatoes community to come to his office so he could pander to them real-time as he was writing. Perhaps if he was not simply trying to drum up page views, he might have put any effort into his piece at all and at least countered the statement with a reminder that Rififi unfolded in near-silence, while Inception uses Nolan's heavy exposition, but then that would be an actually relevant comment on the movie itself, which I suspect Goldstein didn't even see before his screed on the importance of maintaining a consensus and keeping the hype machine chugging.

That is my main concern for the film's future, that people will not examine it -- whether they ultimately like or dislike their findings -- and instead view Inception in the stifling vacuum created by marketing, in which movies suck the money out of our wallets and the synapses of our brains, numbing us to a simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" reaction; everyone blames Siskel & Ebert for this, but at least they backed up their reasoning. Analyzing the twists and turns of Inception may not reward in the same way that readings of the humanist works of an Ozu or a Kiarostami lead to greater understanding of not only the movie but life, but why not have a go at sorting out some of Nolan's dreamscape?

Some fault The Prestige for caring more about fooling the audience than letting the magic infuse the film, a contention I occasionally agree with (thus I am always switching my preference for magician-based films of 2006 between Nolan's more science-centric thriller and The Illusionist, which better captures the intoxication and beguiling charm of being hoodwinked into seeing something wonderful). But The Prestige was not about magic but illusions, standing previously as the director's finest outpouring of his love for legerdemain. Nolan loves to pull a fast one on us, not because he thinks himself superior but because he's got some cheek on him. Not all con jobs are mean-spirited, and the director appeals to our desire to work out that which stymies us. Some, as they do when shown a magic trick, will demand to know the secret but will give up when the magician playfully wags his finger. Others will study the move until they can perform it themselves, and it is those people to whom Nolan caters.

Inception is his greatest swindle yet, in the best possible sense: by leaving its imagery on the table, existing outside even the most expository dialogue the film has to offer, the director imparts his vision onto us and entrusts the audience with taking from it what they will. Inception's truncated final shot sent a groan of withheld resolution from the crowd, but the tease only implanted the idea of the film deeper into their minds, and the appreciation pouring out of the crowd as they left the theater reveals that Nolan's trickery is not cruel. It's a sign of respect in a field where no one seems to believe in the maturity of an audience anymore, and the taste of the stereotyped "masses" that Goldstein defends so pathetically might hedge closer to that of the critics' if the mainstream treated them with respect. "You musn't be afraid to dream a bit bigger, darling," Eames says to Arthur as he brandishes a ludicrous weapon during a shootout with hostile subconscious projections, and the line may be as much a challenge to everyone else currently using up hundreds of millions of dollars of studio money to no artistic end as it is a offhand bit of British cheek.

Public Enemies

There may be no major Hollywood director as underrated as Michael Mann. Only Martin Scorsese can claim to capture America's seedy underworld better, and even the master lacks Mann's attention to detail. He's far from a "style over substance" director, though; masterpieces like Heat and The Insider take the time to examine their characters outside the superb action sequences. Sadly, that character examination is sorely lacking in his new film, Public Enemies, in which his characters are so calculatingly shot that they might as well be a part of the beautiful backgrounds.

Maybe that's the point: too many films destroy our mythic figures by applying cheap psychology to them, and Mann is trying to spare us yet more talk of abusive fathers or warped moral codes. Such explanations are hinted at, but they're delivered through lines that mock such conventions, as if the movie buff Dillinger is as sick of them as we are. Yet a film with a known outcome needs some sort of revisionist analysis to justify its existence, especially one clocking in at two and a half hours.

As a result, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale – two of the most brilliantly off-kilter actors in the business – never get to sink their teeth into their roles, those of infamous gangster John Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Pruvis, respectively. These men, as with the cop and robber in “Heat,” are perfect foils for one another: Dillinger robs banks because he cannot accept authority, while Purvis is trying to prove the usefulness of the FBI, which is still in its infancy in the ‘30s. Both spend a great deal of time staring into the dying eyes of fallen comrades, only furthering their resolve.

However, Mann spends so much time playing up both sides as heroic archetypes that neither ever becomes interesting. Heat worked because both the cop and the robber were trapped, tragic victims of their own pride and world view. Pacino and De Niro's characters were perfect foils because they saw in each other a kindred spirit, the only person who could fully understand their turmoil. There is no equivalent to the diner scene in Public Enemies, nor is there even a successful juxtaposition between the two: we merely see the Robin Hood-esque robber and the agent who is no less heroic for taking him down.

Dillinger and Purvis duke it out in a Depression-era America painstakingly researched and perfectly recreated that it would look as real as anything you’d see on your own street corner even without the documentary-like direction. But that camera work, combined with the sharp detail of digital cameras, makes the film feel more like a technical exercise than a visceral crime epic.

Nevertheless, Mann has a gift for pacing, and Public Enemies zips along despite its padded length, which lapses into a loop of planning-robbery-aftermath. Its action scenes, the best of which being the shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge, jump out of nowhere and, true to heists and crackdowns, are over as soon as they begin. The little details of Dillinger's heists, from letting the customers keep their money to tying hosting to the getaway car to discourage any gunfire, give these scenes a sense of visceral realism. True to form, Mann makes the gunfire loud and the muzzle flashes blinding -- be sure to bring some aspirin with you, just in case.

If only the actors had something to do, they might have filled the gap between these brief but overpowering shooting matches. Marion Cotillard, in her first role since her Oscar win for La Vie en Rose, is completely flat as Dillinger’s main squeeze, and Billy Crudup brings nothing more to the role of J. Edgar Hoover than a bad accent. Mann has an under-appreciated knack for getting great performances from his actors, be they master craftsmen like Al Pacino and Daniel Day-Lewis or more star-oriented players like Tom Cruise and Will Smith (who genuinely earned his Oscar nomination in the otherwise unremarkable Ali). Only Stephen Graham’s manic portrayal of Baby Face Nelson breaks free of the cage that holds everyone else; Dillinger lives the gangster life for the media that turn him into a sensation, but Nelson is just plain crazy, and Graham pulls it off beautifully.

I don't want to suggest that the film is boring, mind you; the shootouts only continue to prove that Mann is the finest action director working today. But what's with the shaky-cam? The reason why the battle in Heat remains one of the great cinematic gunfights is the simple fact that you can tell what's going on. In an age where action editing consists of forcing a first-person perspective on the audience to the point that we can no longer make out all the vast special effects, I was looking forward to Michael Mann showing the kids how to do it right. These scenes vacillate between the artful camera work that defined his old action sequences with the hands-on digital approach that informed recent work like the brilliant Collateral and the misfire Miami Vice, and they left me wanting more even as I was absorbed in the moment.

In the end, “Public Enemies” is a technically resplendent film that never shifts out of first gear until its chief action sequence, only to shift down again as soon as it’s over. Mann always was too fond of his scripts, which sometimes paid off (Heat) and sometimes derailed what might have been a decent flick (Miami Vice); this most definitely fits the latter. Well, assuming this film has a point at all, because I've yet to figure out why Mann made it at all. As it is, it’s certainly worth your money as a popcorn flick, but too much of this film, right down to its title, is uncharacteristically and tragically generic.