‘Inception’ thrills, but its emotional core runs cold

There's no arguing the grand conceptual awesomeness of Christopher Nolan's "Inception," but watching it is a little like taking the SAT.

It takes sweaty, anxious concentration to decipher this new offering from Nolan, the movies' premier player of mind games ("Memento") and designer of battle-of-wits dramas ("The Prestige," "The Dark Knight") that test the mental mettle of protagonist, antagonist and audience.

"Inception" is a match for "Memento" in terms of its structure and daring - suffice it to say, it pushes audience tolerance for storytelling intricacy beyond the boundaries established by "Grown Ups."

Nolan's indulgence would be infuriating, in fact, if it weren't also flattering. The implicit message to ticket buyers: You're good enough, you're smart enough and doggone it, you're worth it. The studio evidently thought so and handed Nolan $80 million to spend on offbeat effects.

And, for once, it's money well spent. Nolan's bizarro world of M.C. Escher-painting staircases, cityscapes that fold like maps, corridors of weightlessness and decaying and imploding worlds add up to a look that's witty and unique.

And there were a few shekels left over for a pretty good cast, led by Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, a psychic inventor and spy who's found a way to drill into an individual's subconscious and, being a Yank, a way to sell this service.

The highest bidder turns out to be Saito (Ken Watanabe), a mysterious Asian billionaire who hires Cobb and his team to plant a particular (and to Saito, profitable) idea into the subconscious of a man (Cillian Murphy) about to inherit control of a massive corporation.

Cobb goes to work with his team - an architect (Ellen Page) who designs the dream, a druggist (Dileep Rao, the guy who was so good in "Drag Me to Hell") to keep the subject sedated and various technicians/psychic secret agents (Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to play roles inside the dream.

The rub? For the plan to work, Cobb must blend his own subconscious with the subject's, and Cobb's psychic closet is inhabited by his dead wife (Marion Cotillard), who turns up to sabotage whatever Cobb's trying to do. (Anyone who's seen and understood "Memento" will be prepared for "Inception's" view of marriage and its pitfalls.)

Nolan outlines the rules of the game well, a prelude to his big and unprecedented storytelling gambit, as Cobb and company burrow through multiple layers of the dreamworld, into dreams underneath dreams.

The director's bravura half-hour climax is a story told on multiple levels . . . at multiple speeds! The deeper the dream level, the slower time passes, so 10 seconds on level one is 10 years on level four.

During that time, Nolan's characters exist simultaneously in an airplane, in a van, in a hotel, in a winter fortress and finally in the basement (literally) of Cobb's sick, twisted subconscious, where his dead wife lurks like Frederica Krueger.

Nolan juggles the five "realities" lucidly, so bravo - in terms of making a complex story of the real and unreal comprehensible, it's up there with "Being John Malkovich."

Fans of Nolan's mazes and mousetraps will eat it up. Others, like me, will want to know why we're engaged in this mental exercise. (It was about halfway through "The Prestige," for instance, that I realized I didn't care which magician won, or why.) And the drama of Cobb's family, meant to form the movie's emotional core, left me a little cold.

Still, there is something resonant about Nolan's work beyond its showy plotting. The biggest risk Nolan takes isn't complexity, it's building a movie around his fundamentally downbeat view of the world.

He's a pessimist, and his work has found an audience in part because it speaks to a dispirited age, most brilliantly in the way he mapped war-on-terror psychologies in "The Dark Knight."

Nolan pastes a Band-Aid of cheer on "Inception" at the end, but it doesn't stick. What you take away is another of his meditations on curdled love, eroding worlds and decaying fantasies.

And this line:

"The dream is collapsing."

That was on a billboard somewhere, as we drove into the 21st century.