Inception's dreamy femme fatale
Thursday, July 16, 2020 at 10:43PM 
It's a bit strange for me to be writing a celebratory piece about Inception on the movie's 10th anniversary. I've always considered the picture to be a tad overrated, undeserving of the titles of life-changing masterpiece or perfect action movie that I've seen people bestow upon it. Aside from a deadening first hour of exposition, my main issue has always been a matter of imagination or lack thereof. The world of dreams and the human unconscious is so rich in possibility, that it's disheartening to see Christopher Nolan bend it to fit the model of a heist picture.
Even the set design reflects that. There's much talk of impossible architecture, but what we get is modernist lines as far as the eye can see, bellicose fortresses and concrete cityscapes without a hint of surrealism. Notoriously, Satoshi Kon's Paprika, an anime hallucination with a lot of similarities to the Nolan blockbuster, is a good example of how the oneiric world of dream-sharing can be used to explode the rules of cinema. Still, has previously stated, this is a celebratory write-up and, while Inception's creative limitations may be frustrating, it would be a lie to say they are devoid of value.
After all, the most interesting character in the whole flick is an archetype of crime pictures and film noir. She's a trope, an old character type that has deep roots in men's fear of complicated women. She is Marion Cotillard's Mal…
By far the most fascinating member of Leonardo DiCaprio's Dead Wives Club, Mal is introduced before many of Inception's main characters. During a mission gone wrong inside the mind of the businessman Saito, Dicaprio's Cobb comes face to face with the mysterious Mal. Clad in Jeffrey Kurland's glamourous designs, she's a vision of sensuous elegance that seems at odds with Inception's penchant for cold utilitarianism. Slinky in beaded silk, she glides through a Japanese dream palace like an Angel of Death, threatening in her beauty and preternatural confidence. However, when talking to Cobb, there's a sense of sorrow shading the provocation.
As previously explored in the Almost There series, Marion Cotillard is an actress capable of finding layers of meaning in the most minuscule of gestures. Even when saddled with mediocre pictures and underwritten roles, she's usually able to make full-bodied people out of her characters. Mal isn't a person by any means, though, and it's deliberate. From the go, there's an odd vacuity about the way Cotillard plays her, performing the violent betrayal of Cobb and his colleagues in a mechanic way that seems more motivated by the model of the femme fatale archetype than by a clear human will.
Even before we know the tragic truth about Mal, she comes off as a ghost, a shade of a person that haunts and terrifies but never convinces as something more than a dreamy threat. She's a symphony written with only a couple of notes, maybe a trio – sorrow, threat, and sensuous glamour. Burdened by guilt and grief that has metastasized like cancer, Cobb has immortalized his suicidal wife in the form of a violent memory who intends to remind him of his failings for perpetuity and imprison him in the virtual world she inhabits. In that sense, Mal, at least the Mal we see, is another facet of Cobb. DiCaprio and Cotillard are thus playing different sides of the same character.
In a way, Mal's also the weaponizing of Nolan's limitations when writing female characters, something he's never been particularly good at. She's a woman imagined by a man, a miasma of assumptions and desires, of repressed culpability and idealized romanticism, the faint whisper of a real person. During the picture's climax, Cobb even admits that she isn't the real Mal, merely a shade of the woman he once loved. His imagination can't conceive of the entirety of a human, her perfections and imperfections. The monumental specificity that made her special is always beyond him.
Even in flashback, the storm of helpless despair that Mal embodies is an idea of her guilt-ridden husband, the man who drove her mad and is now being driven mad by his memory of her. Cotillard is perfect in this role, painting an impressionist portrait with a limited palette and making Mal all the more affecting because of how unhuman she is. While re-watching Inception, I found myself treasuring every moment spent with this ghost of remembrance, this beautiful mess of a character whose archetypal menace does more with the concept of dreamy unreality than any other element of the movie. See Inception for Mal, she deserves our attention.
Inception is available to stream on FuboTV and TNT. You can also rent it from Amazon, Apple iTunes, Youtube, Google Play, and others.
Reader Comments (13)
This is one of the best performances in a Nolan film. She was getting a push for supporting actress. Honestly she could have been another article in the Almost There series.
I do love this film as I also enjoyed Marion Cotillard's performance as I think she's an amazing character as I also liked Ellen Page's character in the film.
All female characters in Nolan's movies are terrible, and this one is no exception.
Adore this film and she won my personal Supporting Actress honor that year. I love so many sequences in this film, and many of them involve her. I guess I live in the part of the internet that regularly thinks Nolan is overrated, so I generally find myself defending him, though I only really enjoy about half of his films. I personally love the concepts behind this film, and Cotillard teases out everything her character is bringing perfectly.
I was a big inception fan, and I think it’s one of Nolan’s stronger outings. It just pulls you in from the start and never lets you go.
A big part of that is the way Cotillard carefully plays Mal. There’s so much you feel whenever she shows up. I think this performance is the one made me a big Cotillard Stan. After this (and not her Oscar winning role), I had to see every performance she ever did, and every future performance in theatre. What she does with just a sketch of a character is truly incredible.
Claudio: Except Inception's premise "What If Heist Narrative, but Dreams/The Mind" has been done brilliantly since. Not as a film, though. Persona 5 has many virtues, and "Inception Done Right" is absolutely one of them.
Her work is by miles the most watchable performance in this, and I prefer it to most of the Supporting Actress turns nominated that year. I don't think Inception holds up that well apart from tech & crafts, but I'd happily watch her scenes over and over and over.
Inception was one of my favorite films when it came out, but I was 18. I watched the movie recently and hated it, I found it corny, dated, unimaginative and very cringy in general. The amount of exposition is inexcusable, it's like the characters are talking about the movie instead of just being in it.
And regarding Marion, I'd have to disagree. I've loved her in everything else and she's one of my favorite actresses, but in this she's completely limited by the character and just trying so hard.
The only one who seems to have fun in that film is Tom Hardy, who understood he didn't have to take it seriously.
I think Cotillard is really good. She sells the idea that someone could/did get lost in a maze of dreams. All the actors are solid, as is the film itself overall, but I do fall on the side of it being a bit overrated. This mostly because of that midsection of exposition that just brings everything to a screeching halt, and the typical Nolan problem of everything just being a tad too serious (as folks have pointed out). Is Tom Hardy calling Joseph Gordon Levitt "darling" the most fun and sexy moment of ANY Nolan film?
I find all of Nolan’s movies a slog to get through, this one especially.
LOVE her in this. My pick for the winner that year.
Inception was the first time I stood up and yelled "BOOOOOOO" in a theater when a movie ended. The only other time was The Irishman. Both movies are filled with actors I love and yet were absolute mindless torture to endure. The awful, loud brass score that made me want to light myself on fire gives Inception a slight lead over Scorcese's bloated nothingness to earn my worst movie of all time award.
A miasma of assumptions and desires.
This.
So very true.