Inception
Blu-ray Combo Pack | DVD
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Paige, Marion Cotillard, Michael Cain, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe
Warner Bros Home Entertainment
Release date: December 7, 2010

American Beauty had a tagline that instructed us to “look closer.” Apply this instruction to Inception and see what lurks underneath the myriad of descriptions explaining what inception and extraction actually are. Adhering to a more surgical approach to Christopher Nolan‘s film we will be granted what truly drives the movie. Looking closer we are no longer misconstrued by the esoteric explanations of dreams, but are firmly grooved along a rail that is undeviating in its approach of getting to the heart of the film: which is the wounded souls of two men who inhabit an unrelenting atmosphere of ceaseless action.

The true meaning of this film isn’t about penetrating through multiple layers of dreams, nor is it about an espionage heist. Inception, as psychologically brilliant as it is, is even more potent when it reveals that it has a heart; a heart so beaten down to a wounded mass that it is thriving to be resuscitated. It is this kind of heart that takes the film past the esoteric and psychological realms of excessive commotion and into the heights of the masses who can empathize with what it is like to have a heart that feels it cannot be mended. Here is Nolan channeling a universal theme of extreme grief. We are swimming in a pool of grief the entire span of the film (the brooding soundtrack is evidence). Hearts want to mend the past, dissipate the regret pervading its existence and get revenge on things eating away at it. Nolan created a character that had intact these same motivations in his hallmark film Memento. That film and Inception reveal men disconcerted with their current way of living, motivated by past events and regrets that have the potential to drive them mad.