| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | Cinema |
Still Spitting on Dreams
Interesting movie whose reach exceeds its grasp. Yet the reach is formidable.
Hopefully, intellectually- and emotionally-challenging films will become a new Hollywood norm since here we have an expensive cinematic spectacle that goes some way to achieving just that.
The perfunctory gunfights are weakly-staged and reveal a filmmaker (Christopher Nolan) uninterested in such sights. Instead, he revels - somewhat self-indulgently - in a complex plot that envisions the common plight of those attempting to escape the strictures of reality - through their dreams being made more real than their waking lives.
Yet the film's dream sequences are at once hyper-realistic while - like a (Salvador Dali painting - spit on the very dreams depicted. Painting dreams as if they were real nullifies the dream state; making it hard to distinguish between it and reality. The film itself falls into this trap by never clarifying whether the characters are awake or asleep; making it hard to understand why the characters would take such risks with their sanity. The SFX thus fail to impress in their monumentalism (ie, a paradoxical lack of creative imagination used to represent the imagination) because they look nothing like real dreams and do not serve the same purpose - an analysis of reality in symbolic terms.
The overly-large cast creates too many characters for an audience to follow; explaining the film's over-length. In particular, Ariadne does not fulfill the role suggested by her name and so distracts from the more impressive Marion COTILLARD. Ariadne's expository function is played by a mediocrity while COTILLARD actually understands her role and acts accordingly; while the star (the ever-feeble Leonardo DICAPRIO) is lost in a love story that is quite beyond his acting abilities. Clearly, bankable stars are still needed to front expensive films despite their being quite wrong for their parts.
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