Christopher Nolan | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Nov

insomnia

Posted by Perich at 8:01 am

(Part of the ongoing Noirvember series. Click on the tag to see more)

While Memento gets more plaudits for its inventive storytelling, and the Batman series earned him his chops, I think Insomnia is Christopher Nolan’s best entry into the noir genre. It proves that, even without the framing device of Memento, Nolan can still tell stories of tension, uncertainty, and redemption in a gray world. Add to that an unorthodox setting and a phenomenal cast and you have a story that embodies one of the classic tropes of noir: a man struggling with a moral dilemma, alone in a sea of friendly faces.

Pacino makes a return to the restrained intensity of his Godfather days, saving the occasional raspy yell for emotional climaxes. He plays Will Dormer, a legendary Los Angeles police detective who’s out of his element, investigating a murder in an Alaskan town during a season where the sun stays up for 24 hours. His dislocation and his fatigue cause him to make a tragic mistake very early on in the assignment – a mistake that the murderer witnesses and exploits. And Dormer’s helpless against it, because he knows that the truth in a case like this isn’t as important as the perception of the truth. The perception can take on a life of its own, an image that detaches from the object it reflects until it becomes a hallucination. In this way, Dormer becomes a prisoner of everyone’s perception of him: the fellow officer, the suffering insomnia victim, the exemplary investigator.

Robin Williams – who should honestly give up on comic roles – astounded me as the murderer. Given his background, the temptation must have been strong to play Finch like a megalomaniac or an unhinged lunatic. But it’s the smarmy calm that makes him a perfect villain. He’s spent his whole life constructing neat little murder narratives, and now one’s been handed to him like a present. He shares observation after observation about the nature of death, killing, and crime. His benign pedantry sounds harmless, almost profound, until you remind yourself that he’s talking about something he’s actually done. It helps that he has the rasping, businesslike Pacino to play off of. “You’re my job,” Pacino observes. “You’re what I’m paid to do. You’re about as mysterious to me as a blocked toilet is to a fucking plumber.”

Hillary Swank walks a line that’s tough for younger actors to manage: coming off as enthusiastic without being cloying. She clearly has a spine to her, and Nolan does a good job setting her up as a woman apart, isolated from her colleagues by the devotion she applies to the most mundane tasks. She worships Dormer, but as a source of wisdom, not with the infatuation of a child.

Given the wordiness of Nolan’s later films, it’s amazing how much of Insomnia gets by with wordless shots, especially considering that it’s a police procedural where everyone acts alone. Dormer has to cover up his crime by himself; Burr (Swank) has to investigate the one unresolved detail by herself. Yet there are no voice-overs, no self-narration to bring the audience along. We reach every conclusion at the same time our protagonists do, or perhaps a second afterward. Like them, we have no one to bounce ideas off of. We can’t comfort ourselves with the sound of our voice, or another’s voice, and so we’re left with an icy riverbed, an apartment hallway, a dead dog in an alley.

Aug

weep and you weep alone

Posted by Perich at 7:46 am

I disagree with IOZ’s review of Inception almost entirely. I think Inception is the smartest action movie that’s come out in years^*. I think the tension and pacing are handled masterfully, such that a 2h28m movie never feels boring. Chris Nolan is this generation’s Hitchcock, and I don’t toss that out just because “Hitchcock” is a big name in movies. Nobody handles big-budget suspense half as well as he does.

But IOZ touches on one uncomfortable truth: Nolan’s movies are losing their humor. Consider Memento, his breakthrough release. Sure, it’s another grim tale of a man driven by his inner demons to wreck his life and the lives of those around him. But Nolan breaks the tragic arc with frequent bursts of laughter. Some of it comes from Joe Pantoliano, a brash comic-relief character who’s more than he seems. Some of it comes from Guy Pearce’s dry regard for his own situation (“I’m chasing this guy … no, he’s chasing me”). And it’s not as if a man with anterograde amnesia solving a murder mystery is an inherently funny premise. It sounds like a nightmare. But Nolan adds humor with such a deft touch that you know it’s deliberate.

After that came Insomnia, a remake, with Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hillary Duff. It’s not quite as funny, but we still get a few laughs at small-town America and Pacino’s inability to cope with it. There’s humor, but not as much of it as in Memento. And a lot of it comes from the bad guy – the dark humor of cynicism, rather than a lighter chuckle. Consider Williams’ taunting phone calls to Pacino, or his interrogation with Pacino in the room. It’s humor that’s meant to add to tension, not lighten it.

The Batman movies proceed in the same vein. I can only recall one big laugh in Batman Begins, when Bruce Wayne reads the headlines the day after his mansion burns down. Almost every joke in The Dark Knight comes out of Heath Ledger’s words or actions (the magic pencil, dressing up as a nurse, etc). Those rough chuckles aside, it’s nothing but a grim march from initial disturbance to final showdown.

Lighten up.

And then Inception. IOZ only counts one joke in the entire movie: a stolen kiss. I’d say there’s more than that: Eames, the British “forger,” gets some good ones at Arthur’s expense. Still, when you’re sifting through a 148-minute movie and coming up with a few nuggets, you know Nolan’s made something grim. Compare that to Hitchcock at his best, who laced his movies with sexual innuendo, snubs at authority and light banter all while rocketing toward a tense climax. I hope Nolan reverses this course with his next flick, or else I’m locking up the whiskey and guns before I go see it.

Update: I didn’t exhaustively list the rest of the jokes, and I did in fact forget a few. I think the point still stands: Inception is a grimmer movie than Memento. It’s a grimmer movie than your typical summer action fare, like Jaws or Iron Man. It’s definitely grimmer than Rear Window; it’s perhaps comparable to Psycho. Is that much in doubt?

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* One might agree and call that “damning with faint praise.” Sometimes I leave the last apple on the tree for guests.

Jul

whether it’s two weeks, two years or just tonight

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Inception: this past Friday, Overthinking It marked its thousandth post with a survey of why the writers read so deeply into pop culture. I talked about the need to treat pop culture seriously and with a literate eye – especially among geeks, who aren’t known for a lot of notches on the spectrum between “SQUEE!” and “worst movie ever.” I want to raise the bar for genre movies.

So that’s why I overthink. I want to give geek culture—video games, RPGs and sci-fi movies—the language of sober analysis. I want to turn the Coke-bottle lenses back in on themselves. I want to teach people that mere enthusiasm is not enough to make something Good Art. I want people to start thinking about their passions.

And then Chris Nolan comes along and proves me right.

Inception is the smartest action movie I’ve seen in years. The concept within – questioning layers of reality – won’t shock anyone who’s read some mid-tier science fiction. But I have never seen a big-budget action movie that treated that concept with as much honesty as Inception has. It’s baked it into the characterization, the plot, the cinematography, the editing, the soundtrack – all of it. This is an action movie that does not ask us to “turn off our brains” for a few hours, but demands that we give it our full attention through its running time and then for several hours afterward. As fellow Overthinker Pete Fenzel put it, you’ll profit more not from trying to figure out definitively What Did Happen, but by stretching your brain through the possibilities of What Could Have Happened.

And it’s a great movie, besides! While so many action movies struggle to build tension, Inception keeps the suspense at the edge of the throttle for essentially the last forty-five minutes^*. The exposition, so necessary for a sci-fi movie, unfolds in a way that plays with the special effects and reveals bits of character. Leo DiCaprio plays big, as he is wont to do, and lets Joseph Gordon-Levitt be the grounded presence that keeps him honest. Ellen Page is the voice of the audience: curious about the process our heroes use, but not so skeptical as to plant her feet and keep from being dragged in. And the action scenes play with the conventions of reality – gravity-bending brawls, snowy mountain shootouts – without losing us in the melee.

I’ve said this before, but: I will never again accept a movie that asks me to stop thinking before I can enjoy it. That’s no longer an option. A genre which is capable of Inception, to quote Raymond Chandler, is not by definition incapable of anything. I want films about redemption and betrayal and ambition and dishonor and memory and reality and time and space. And I want them full of chases and gunfights. And I want them to star good actors who deliver good dialogue. Inception proves it’s possible. Christopher Nolan has planted the idea in my mind, and it’s never getting out.

* Immediately after seeing the movie, I described Christopher Nolan as “this generation’s Hitchcock.” It’s not a comparison I made by accident. I haven’t seen a big director who plays tension quite as well since Hitchcock died. Consider the “prisoner’s dilemma” scene in The Dark Knight. Or, well, the entire third act of this movie.

Dec

the decade in film: 2003-06

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 10:30 am

The end of a decade brings out the End Of Decade lists. I have little qualification to talk about the Best Movies of the Decade. Better critics than I have already put their lists together; I could only re-arrange the order.

So the following list does not contain the Best Films of the Decade. But it has films that all meant something to me, personally. Call them my Signature Films of the First Decade of the Second Millennium. Or something snappier.

Part Two: The Post College Years: 2003-06

In 2003 I saw the first film that I got in an Internet argument over: Kill Bill. A combination of what I liked least about Quentin Tarantino’s style (not knowing how, or when, to edit) with what I liked least about samurai movies (gushing blood) made for an appalling ninety minutes. Strangers told me I was a barbarian for not picking up on, or appreciating, all of Tarantino’s subtle references. I knew they were references, guys; that doesn’t make the film any good. Still don’t like it.

I joined Netflix in late ’03. Netflix deserves its own special chapter in the history of film in the 21st century; what it’s done for the at-home viewing experience is nothing short of remarkable. I remember waiting for Catch Me If You Can, my first Netflix movie, with uncertainty. Was it going to show? Would it be in watchable condition? Netflix was new enough at this point, remember, that it could have all been a complicated scam or a poor business model. Today, as the dominant platform for watching DVDs at home, it’s hard to imagine a time when this was in doubt.

(Catch Me If You Can: diverting, not great)

Netflix exposed me to the best (Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, Collateral, The Italian Job) and worst (Terminator 3, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Italian Job) that the last seventy years of film had to offer. It’s made me a more sophisticated student of film. It’s also given me plenty to blog about.

Finally, this was also the period when big-budget superhero flicks came back in style. With Spider-Man and X-Men opening the door earlier in the century, DC waded in with their heavy hitters. I saw Superman Returns on Independence Day in 2006, giving it a B for effort and a C-minus for output. I debated its merits and failings with Matt McG. at a rooftop barbecue later that afternoon. “It would have been a much more satisfying movie if Batman showed up on that Kryptonite island,” I remarked.

I was hearkening back to my memories of Batman Begins in 2005: a more mature and satisfying look at the superhero movie than I’d ever seen. Batman Begins was innately satisfying to me because it used the conventions of Serious Film – clever cinematography, good pacing, characterization, dialogue – to tell a story about a Comic Book. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was good, sure, but it still had the flamboyance of a comic book splashed on screen. In the hands of Chris Nolan, however, you could believe that this Batman guy was real.

Part three on Friday, if I feel like it.

Dec

the decade in film: 2000-03

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 10:38 am

On vacation this week. This post was scheduled long ago.

Part One: The College Years: 2000-03

In 2000, after Boston College’s alt-tabloid Naked Singularity grew too liberal for me – also, we never managed to put out more than one issue every semester, if that; add to that the fact that, like any random sampling of college progressives we could never agree on what was the most pressing issue that BC needed to take a stand against, Israeli mobilization on the West Bank or the lack of organic food in the Rathskellar; publishing burdens to which none of us really objected, because the paper was a great excuse to get together once every two weeks and drink in a cool off-campus apartment, opportunities which, as a shy freshman, I harvested like diamonds in a Jwaneng mine, plus I had a crush on two of the editors; and somehow they put me in charge of budgeting, a process I botched terribly, which probably led to the fact that they didn’t publish a lot of papers in subsequent years, but if we hadn’t canceled a meeting to all go listen to this visiting professor rant about the WTO I would have put in more of an effort – I started reviewing movies for the regular student paper, The Heights.

The weekly Arts and Entertainment staff meeting consisted of the editor sitting at the head of a table in BC’s upper campus dining hall, waiting for enough writers to show up to constitute a quorum. He would then divvy up assignments for the coming week. The divvyables were a pile of promo CDs, concert tickets and passes to free screenings for shows and movies around town. Unless a more senior writer had already spoken for one, the pile was first-come, first-served. I made my bones by showing up regularly, turning in decent if not astounding work, and volunteering to see movies no one should have been forced to see (Saving Silverman; Sugar and Spice; Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, etc).

Late in the year, Jeremy (the A&E editor) sat at the head of a largely empty table. Just a few of the regulars had shown up with me. Sifting to the bottom of the screenings pile, he pulled up a folded letter with an embossed sticker on the bottom. The sticker was a common studio tactic to keep reviewers from photocopying passes for friends. “Anyone free on Tuesday at 11:00 AM?”, he asked. “I have one here for a ‘martial arts romance’ from Ang Lee, called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Thus began a ten-year love affair with martial arts cinema. I’d seen Yuen Wo-Ping’s work before (The Matrix, naturally), but nobody had told me kung fu films could be such stirring spectacles. Of course, they wouldn’t have thought to tell me: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a very atypical kung fu film. It uses none of the jump cuts or sudden zooms that are common in Shaw Brothers pictures but which would jar a Western audience. Its pacing and scope call to mind Sense and Sensibility more than an action flick.

Seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with a theater full of critics also tuned me into the delicious high of being an insider. I saw the movie months before it debuted in the States. I felt like quite the connected little mastermind as the buzz surrounding the film began to trickle out. This insufferable snottiness has been hard to shake.

I had a similar reaction to Memento, which I saw in limited release with a few members of the Boston Objectivist Network. Can’t recall everyone who was in attendance, but it was a sizable turnout. Give a group of people who talk philosophy every month a movie like Memento, with its epistemological and ethical implications, and they’ll have discussion fodder for weeks. Following the movie, we retired to S&S in Inman Square, the sprawling deli which would become a haunt of mine years later. We debated until the staff were stacking chairs on the tables around us.

Today if I want gripping suspense thrillers that challenge my notions of causality, I have a wider palate to search through. But at the time Memento broke ground for me. It challenged my conventional notions of storytelling, editing and pacing. But it also introduced some interesting ethical quandaries: what’s the difference between justice and revenge? is justice worthwhile if you never remember getting it? if so, to whom and for what end? and is a goal-oriented life worth living if all your goals are artificially manufactured? and do we have any choice in the matter?

I had a long analogy here about how The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was the first movie I saw in theaters after the September 11th razing of the World Trade Center. It’s the sort of anecdote that’s rife with significance: I saw it with my family; I saw it in a packed theater; I saw it on Christmas Day, etc. In the end, I deleted that paragraph, so you don’t get to read it. It would have been too forced, and more than a little trite.

But if the first decade of the Twenty-First Century was the decade of Good vs. Evil, then starting it with The Fellowship of the Ring is apropos. Though it wasn’t as crypto-Christian as Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien invested the Lord of the Rings series with Catholic flavor, especially the love of the traditional English countryside. Peter Jackson reproduced the epic scope of the Fellowship’s march not just faithfully, but better than faithfully, evicting Tolkien’s most boring and odd segments in favor of desperate chases, exciting battles and wondrous landscapes. It gave birth to a host of imitators, but it also proved that epic fantasy and sci-fi wasn’t dead yet in film.

Finally, I have Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to thank for several things. Black Pearl was a surprise to everyone: I don’t think anyone expected a Jerry Bruckheimer picture based on a Walt Disney World ride to be any good at all, much less an entertaining adventure. But the writers took Disney’s budget, invented their own mythology, and had fun with it.

Black Pearl got me back into gaming after a long absence: while I’d been playing for a while, I wouldn’t have run anything if Depp, Bloom and Knightley hadn’t inspired me. And since the first game I ran introduced two of my dearest friends – John Fraley and Melissa Carubia – whom I would end up marrying eight years later, the movie has a deep, personal significance as well. They entered the wedding reception to Klaus Badelt’s boisterous theme and, of course, applause.

On Wednesday: the Post-College Years (2003-06).