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.