Ill-Informed Gadfly

“Inception” contains some of the most spectacular nonsense ever committed to film – drivel with intellectual and aesthetic rigor. Writer-director Christopher Nolan crafts a fine impersonation of a good movie, with strong, brooding performances, gorgeous atmospherics and inventive, if showy, digital effects. But Nolan is more interested in toying with his audience than telling a story that holds together, a gambit that should be familiar from his previous original screenplays, “Memento” and “The Prestige.” Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a corporate spy who steals from people’s dreams. He’s hired to attempt the more ambitious “inception” — planting an idea in the mind of a target. The genre trappings are familiar from any heist movie — a damaged hero whose only hope for future happiness rests on one last job. To its credit, “Inception” stages this material intriguingly, within an elaborate, shared dreamworld. This choice allows DiCaprio’s dead wife, played with luminous bitterness by Marion Cotillard, to supply the emotional weight. But Nolan eventually loses control, shuffling between incoherent and unnecessary action sequences, underlined by a droning, bleating Hans Zimmer score. His aim is to tantalize people into seeing the movie again, but there’s a difference between a lucid film that rewards multiple viewings and a deliberately vague puzzle picture that taunts you to make sense of it all. “Inception” is the work of a filmmaker with something to hide. Nolan hasn’t made up his mind or committed fully to his ideas — so he asks the viewer to do the hard work for him.