Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Managing all these nested levels of narrative is a marvelously nerdy accomplishment, no doubt — but this is the most tight-assed vision of the innermost human psyche I’ve ever seen. While Nolan’s images are visually impressive and powered by state-of-the-art digital effects and accomplished stunt work, they’re always ordered and organized with anal precision. They don’t look or feel anything like dreams. (Or, at least, not like my dreams.) They look instead like mediocre action films from the ’90s, or in the case of the supremely boring ski-patrol vs. Arctic fortress shootout found on Level Three, like the Alistair MacLean adaptation “Ice Station Zebra” from 1968. (With Rock Hudson! And Ernest Borgnine!) “Inception” may have been directed by Christopher Nolan, but Nolan’s dreams are apparently directed by Michael Bay.

OK, I know — you want me to back off the high-minded analysis and tell you whether “Inception” is a good destination for those summer moviegoing dollars eager to leap out of your wallet. Sure, I guess so. It’s a cool-looking action movie, carefully constructed and edited, that uses all kinds of nifty locations and a lot of portentous-sounding expositional yammering. It inhabits a Philip K. Dick-style universe of psychological warfare that suggests “The Matrix,” “Total Recall” and “Minority Report” — all of them, by the way, better movies — but it’s fairer to call “Inception” a maze movie or a labyrinth movie than a puzzle movie. Because, as the wisecracking fellow critic sitting next to me observed, every time the story gets puzzling the characters call a timeout and explain it.

So, yeah, if you approach “Inception” with lowered expectations it’s a pretty good time. Problem is, there are no lowered expectations around Christopher Nolan, whose adherents have proclaimed him as the heir to Kubrick and Hitchcock and declared “Inception” a masterpiece. I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but let me suggest that the comparisons aren’t entirely misguided. They’re just not helpful. Nolan has inherited some of Kubrick and Hitchcock’s worst tendencies, most notably their defensive, compulsive inclination to work everything out about their stories and characters to the last detail, as if human beings and the world were algebraic or geometrical phenomena requiring a solution.

But the mysterious power of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” cannot be explained by the ludicrous official story revealed in the final act — indeed, it nearly scotches the whole movie — and the attack of “The Birds” is never explained. As Kubrick’s career progressed he was increasingly drawn to stories that defied or challenged rational analysis, like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “The Shining.” (I think I’d put “Full Metal Jacket” and “Eyes Wide Shut” in that category too, but let’s discuss some other time.) Nolan seems to have learned exactly the wrong lessons from these mentors. For all the complexity, craftsmanship and color of “Inception,” it’s yet another of his ultra-serious schematic constructions with no soul, no sex and almost no joy, all about some tormented dude struggling with his ill-managed Freudian demons. That same guy sitting next to me cracked that Nolan needs to stop seeing a therapist; there’s not nearly enough sublimation in his movies.

At least Nolan hasn’t cast frequent collaborator Christian Bale on this occasion (they’ll presumably be reunited on the next Batman movie), but he’s only traveled as far as go-to tormented dude Leonardo DiCaprio, last seen as the psychiatry-textbook protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island.” DiCaprio’s only 35, but he’s become a vastly different actor in his post-pretty-boy phase, and always seems to play guys who have a dead wife, a sweat-gland malfunction and a really urgent need to find the toilet. In “Inception” that would be Cobb, a dream-state spy or “extractor” who earns big bucks by entering and manipulating people’s dreams to drag out their most closely held secrets.

Nolan throws us into the deep water right away, and in many ways the dazzling first quarter-hour of “Inception” is the best part. There are no opening credits. In the first couple of shots, Cobb washes up on a beach, possibly in Japan, and is dragged into a luxurious house for an audience with an aging yakuza gangster. No, wait — now Saito (Ken Watanabe), the gangster, is much younger. Cobb and his sharp-dressed partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who seems to have materialized out of nowhere, offer to train him to protect himself from dream raiders. No, wait — this is Saito’s dream, and Cobb and Arthur have set a trap for him. Unless he’s also setting a trap for them! But who’s the sultry foreign bombshell (Marion Cotillard) who aligns herself with Saito against Cobb, and doesn’t really seem to belong here?

 After that setting dissolves into a chaotic shootout, all these people (or most of them) wake up in a modest apartment somewhere in Asia or the Middle East — Iran? Pakistan? the West Bank? — where an angry mob is closing in outside. Saito isn’t pleased; he was auditioning Cobb and Arthur for a difficult espionage job, and they failed. No, wait — maybe they didn’t. How and when can the dreamer be absolutely sure he has woken up?

So the themes, ideas and characters of “Inception” are all introduced with brilliant economy, along with its moral and philosophical universe. And then Nolan proceeds to hammer them relentlessly into the ground with an increasingly clumsy, clunky plot and an allegedly profound mystery that just sort of fizzles out into what-if-this-world-isn’t-real sophomoric musing.

Cobb and Arthur are gray-market or black-market entrepreneurs, and Cobb has warrants hanging over his head that keep him from going home to his kids in the United States. (I’ll say no more about that.) His dead wife, Mal (Cotillard), only visits him in dreams — his own and other people’s, even though that’s not really supposed to happen — and doesn’t act all that friendly. Let’s just say that as obvious names for ominous female characters go, that one pretty nearly takes the cake. You didn’t want to call her Fatale, Chris? Or Eve L. DeMenta B. Yotch?

These guys are experts at extracting stuff from people’s minds, but Saito wants them to do something more difficult: “Inception,” where an idea will be planted in someone’s mind so deeply that he’ll believe he thought of it himself. (This is supposed to be so hard, someone explains, because the brain can always track ideas back to their source. Take that, Joseph Goebbels and Fox News! You only think it’s working!) The subject is a youthful energy tycoon named Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who must be persuaded to break up his dying father’s superpower-scale corporation because that’ll be a good thing for the planet. For once I am not being snarky; that is the stated reason.

So Cobb and Arthur have to round up the team of globetrotting rapscallions always demanded by a movie like this: College-girl genius Ariadne (Ellen Page) as the “architect” who designs the dream worlds; chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao) to administer the designer sedatives; shape-shifter Eames (British actor Tom Hardy, always a delight) to act out key roles inside Fischer’s mind. It’s basically “Mission: Impossible II” minus Tom Cruise and John Woo, plus “Ocean’s Eleven” minus a sense of humor and Las Vegas, plus “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” with Marion Cotillard standing in for Freddy Krueger. Except that I just made it sound a whole lot more fun than it really is.

Nolan is completely uninterested in the plot superstructure involving Saito and Fischer, which never amounts to anything and holds no surprises. He is, of course, supremely invested in the details of the three (or four) levels of dream narrative into which our terrorist heroes drag Fischer. Drugging him in awkward and implausible fashion on a Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight, they first pull him into a noir-ish kidnapping drama in a gray, rain-swept city, before all going to sleep again and waking up in a corporate-espionage yarn set in a luxury hotel, where they snooze down another level to the aforementioned Arctic Circle shootout, which could be in one of the Roger Moore Bond movies or an abandoned Cold War drama with Sylvester Stallone. (“No man’s ever broken out of the Soviet Union’s super-secret Northern Fortress. But one man’s going to break IN.”)

All of this involves a bunch of big-ass guys shooting at each other with automatic weapons, which has to be the most arid and depressing depiction of the dream state I’ve ever encountered. There are no surreal images or nonsense dialogue, no illogical shifts of scene from the first-grade classroom to Mom’s kitchen to a whorehouse. It’s all meticulously, ass-clenchingly worked out: One person has to stay awake at each level to retrieve the others from the mind-melting waters of Lethe, and time passes more slowly as the dreamers go deeper. If there’s one thing that dream-state movies need more of, it’s math, and genderless geek-girl Ariadne is all over it: “That means 10 seconds before the van hits the water! That’s three minutes for Arthur in the hotel — and 16 minutes for us!” (I made up that particular line, but it’s representative.)

Sometimes Nolan’s technical expertise produces its own kind of beauty, as in a startling zero-gravity scene in the hotel corridors when the laws of physics apparently rebel on Level Two. But for the most part “Inception” is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth. Nolan establishes a fascinating world, loaded with trapdoors, symbols and hidden secrets, and then squanders the opportunity on an overpriced “Twilight Zone” episode. He casts Cotillard, one of the foxiest actresses alive, as a smoldering temptress who embodies all the female, erotic energy absent from this universe, and then literally locks her in the basement. Mal yearns to escape and get her claws into these constipated, narcoleptic boys (and maybe into Page’s prim androgyne as well), and this movie would be a hell of a lot better if she did. But she’s a girl — no, she’s a woman — and even in dreams it’s too dangerous to let those run around loose. 

Among the films I haven’t seen yet, there’s been a tremendous reaction to the Internet-romance documentary “Catfish,” which apparently has quite a sting in its tail. (Here’s Christopher Kelly of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.) I’ve also heard furious back-and-forth debates about the confrontational drama “Hesher,” which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a long-haired anarchist grief therapist. (Here’s Dennis Lim’s thoughtful but negative review on his Sundance blog.)

“Winter’s Bone” Debra Granik’s blend of low-budget regional realism and crime thriller (adapted from the novel by Daniel Woodrell) is an absolute knockout, for me the narrative film of the festival so far. Young Jennifer Lawrence is sensational as Ree, fierce teenage scion of an Ozark family of bootleggers, outlaws and meth-cookers. When she finds out that her dad has put up her family house and 300 acres of virgin timber on bond, and then jumped bail, Ree has a week to track him down or be evicted, along with her younger sister and brother and her near-catatonic, pharmaceutical-addled mother. Problem is, the only people who might know where Pa is are the meanest and scariest members of her extended family, and what they know might not be stuff Ree wants to learn.

Granik captures the details of life in the ruined and beautiful backwoods villages of Missouri in thoroughly convincing, documentary-like detail, but there’s not much meandering or contemplation. This is a woman who knows how to direct a damn movie; “Winter’s Bone” builds to an ominous, almost breathless tension, every moment pregnant with violence and disaster. John Hawkes adds a powerful performance as her wiry, speed-freak Uncle Teardrop, who virtually oozes menace but is Ree’s closest capable relative and her only source of succor. Channeling both urban myths (“The Sopranos”) and rural ones (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”), Granik reveals herself as a lean and forceful tale-spinner, as courageous in her own way as the indomitable Ree.

“The Tillman Story” Just before Sundance, director Amir Bar-Lev changed the title of his documentary from “I’m Pat Fucking Tillman,” reportedly the last words that the NFL star-turned-Army Ranger said while being gunned down by his own comrades in Afghanistan. But this seemingly nondescript new title has a resonance that becomes clear when you watch Bar-Lev’s fascinating account, made with the consent and cooperation of Tillman’s family. You see, “The Tillman Story” isn’t just about the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire and the military brass lied about it, and essentially have never stopped lying. It’s also about the fact that from the moment of his death, and even before, the former Arizona State and Arizona Cardinals star became a mythic, über-patriotic hero, the centerpiece of a right-wing, pro-military propaganda fable. He was never allowed to be who he was, a surprising, curious, and even eccentric individual who didn’t fit the mold of either football player or gung-ho soldier.

Tillman returned from a tour of duty in Iraq convinced that the war there was both ill-advised and illegal; he reportedly had read essays about American foreign policy by Noam Chomsky and expressed an interest in meeting him. But as Bar-Lev’s film makes clear, it isn’t fair for the left to try to steal Tillman back and make him into its own hero figure. He joined the military in the first place, it appears, out of a genuine belief in patriotic self-sacrifice (although he never discussed the decision in public), and reading Chomsky was part of Tillman’s wide-ranging self-education, which also included Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Book of Mormon. (He was personally an atheist, but had an almost academic interest in religion.) In this funny, profane and profoundly sad film, Bar-Lev depicts Tillman and his similarly unconventional parents and brothers as belonging to a vanishing species: Americans who hew to no ideological standard, and who actually think for themselves.

“Cyrus” Do shlubby John C. Reilly and ultra-hot Marisa Tomei make a plausible couple? They kinda do, in this enjoyably off-kilter romantic comedy from filmmaking brothers Jay and Mark Duplass (“Baghead,” “The Puffy Chair”), who have ascended from zero-budget DIY movies to a mildly more expensive version. (“Cyrus” was actually produced by Ridley and Tony Scott!) Reilly plays a depressed loser whose ex-wife (the Sundance-ubiquitous Catherine Keener) is shoving him back out on the romance market. Tomei’s character is immediately drawn to his lack of pretense (her first words to him: “Nice penis!”), and perhaps to his intense neediness as well. After all, she’s got her overweight, 21-year-old, socially maladjusted son, the eponymous Cyrus (scene-stealing oddness from Jonah Hill), living with her, in a relationship that’s just this side of totally creepy. All the improvised dialogue, herky-jerk camerawork and social discomfort of previous Duplass films is here, along with name actors playing damaged but ultimately human characters. Fox Searchlight will release this later in the year.

“Splice” It’s the parenting movie of the year! Canadian genre director Vincenzo Natali takes a page from his countryman David Cronenberg’s old playbook in this slick, enjoyable, black-comic monster movie about Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), a hot-shit scientific couple infected with bottomless corporate dollars and boundless arrogance. They’ve already created a genetically engineered life form — a pustulent giant caterpillar whose body produces useful pharmaceutical agents — but of course the next stage will involve blending in some human DNA. Good idea, right? Polley and Brody tackle the film’s ludicrous situations with total deadpan commitment; Polley’s Mama Macbeth bonding scenes with the hairless rabbit-cum-alien baby-cum-winged scorpion they produce are almost touching. But don’t kids sometimes come between Mom and Dad, especially when they’re seductive, gender-switching, super-powerful new life forms? I’ve heard some critics complaining about Natali’s tongue-in-cheek blending of every possible monster-movie trope, but for me “Splice” went down smooth, with its sleek surfaces, terrific special effects and disturbing sexiness.

Gordon-Levitt’s movies since his “Brick” breakout have quite frankly been hit and miss, with an accent on miss. Scott Frank’s intriguing neo-noir “The Lookout” generated a cult following, but highly anticipated films like Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss” and Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna” wound up impressing neither audiences nor critics. Frankly, I think Gordon-Levitt is a difficult actor to cast correctly. He’s handsome, intelligent and funny, but his demeanor always seems a little aloof, as if he’s hiding a secret or smiling at a private joke. He’s too charismatic to play the second banana in most movies, but doesn’t seem perfectly suited as the romantic lead either.

At least, he didn’t — not until busting out his Hall & Oates dance moves in this summer’s chronologically challenged rom-com “(500) Days of Summer,” which became a modest hit. This year he has also established himself as a viable action-spectacle supporting character in “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” (he’s in both the film and the video game), before returning to home turf with the low-budget New York indie “Uncertainty,” a tricky narrative experiment from the writing-directing duo of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (“The Deep End” and “Suture”).

“Uncertainty” is a carefully structured but largely improvised film — that’s actually not a contradiction — which is two different movies at once, both of them about Kate (Lynn Collins) and Bobby (Gordon-Levitt), a semi-hip young urban couple facing an unexpected pregnancy and all the Big Life Questions that come with it. In the opening of the film, they flip a coin on the Brooklyn Bridge, and then sprint away on foot into two parallel but separate story lines: “Yellow,” a Manhattan thriller involving a lost cellphone, armed assassins and mysteriously large sums of money; and “Green,” a low-key domestic drama, mostly set at the Queens home of Kate’s South American immigrant parents.

I can’t explain it a whole lot better than that, except to say that both actors are tremendous and that there’s a lot of poetry and ambition to McGehee and Siegel’s project. Even though the stories are so disparate, and the characters themselves come to seem like different people, there are areas of near-intersection: The doubled twosomes drink coffee at the same time, have sex at the same time and go (or do not go) to the same downtown party. The Green couple pick up a stray dog on the street; the Yellow couple kill some time, during their ill-advised extortion scheme, by going to see “Stray Dog,” the 1949 Kurosawa noir.

I’m not quite sure that “Uncertainty” hangs together as well as it might — if anything, the Yellow story is too outrageous, and the Green story too muted — but the unshowy, street-level cinematography by Kathy Li is wonderful and, as I told Gordon-Levitt when he called me last week, it’s great to see a film supposedly set in New York that was actually 100 percent shot there.

“Shooting on the street like that — I mean, it was explosive,” he said. “Maybe that’s a bad word for it. There’s so much energy pulsing through New York City, and film sets are already very high-energy places. When you put that in the middle of New York, it gets pretty intense.”

As ever, Gordon-Levitt was among the most pleasant and personable conversationalists in the business. He claimed to remember an interview we did two and a half years ago in Austin, Texas, and signed off (as he did the last time) by urging me to plug his “collaborative online art project,” which gives him a way to engage with the public that’s distinct from his movie-actor persona. As far as his reported role goes in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming — and much blog-drooled — “Inception,” Gordon-Levitt would only say that yes, he’s in it, and he’s promised not to talk about it. Like I say, an old showbiz pro, in a 28-year-old body.

I guess one of the things that’s nice about shooting on the streets of New York is that people just aren’t that impressed, right? They’re like, “Ah, another film shoot? Who cares?”

True enough. They just want to get where they’re going. It’s hard to shoot a scene when you have to watch out for bike riders on the Brooklyn Bridge. Staying in character, and making sure you don’t get hit. Acting is a challenge, man.

With “(500) Days of Summer,” “G.I. Joe” and now “Uncertainty,” you seem devoted to appearing in every possible kind of movie within a single year.

Well, thank you. I guess I have an eclectic taste, I don’t just like one thing. Contrast is key. What do they say? Variety is the spice of life. My favorite actors are the chameleons, guys like Daniel Day-Lewis, Billy Bob Thornton, Meryl Streep, people who are always different.

But do you concentrate on that? I mean, are you thinking, “I want to do something totally different from the role I just did?” Or did things just fall out that way?

To be honest, that’s not really what I think about. Here’s the way it works: I just see a lot of scripts, and if I like one of them, then I try to get the part. A lot of the scripts I see I don’t particularly like, so I don’t try to get those parts. And then some of the ones I do like, I don’t get the part. But somewhere in there there’s a decision, whether or not I want to pursue a given piece of material. I wouldn’t say I think that much about what I just did, so much as I think about how I feel about the piece that’s in front of me right now.

This particular movie, “Uncertainty,” was created in a highly unusual fashion. Have you ever done anything before with this much improvisation to it?

No, no. This was a unique creative process that the filmmakers, David and Scott, pretty much innovated. I don’t know, maybe other people have done it this way before, but I certainly haven’t done it this way before. They wrote a script, it just didn’t have any dialogue. The story was all very meticulously and thoroughly thought through. It’s not one of those improvisational movies that sort of meander along the way real life does.

And, by the way, I love some of those movies, like Cassavetes, you know, “A Woman Under the Influence,” something like that. I love that movie, and I don’t exactly know what their creative process was on those Cassavetes movies. But “Uncertainty” is different. It’s not so much a slice of life. It’s a highly structured, precisely told story. It’s just that any given moment was left up to that actual moment.

So the movie diverges, right at the beginning, into these two stories, the Yellow story, which is a thriller, and the Green story, which is more like a quiet, indie-film-type family drama. Did you shoot them separately?

Yeah. We shot all of the Yellow story first, and then we shot all of the Green story.

And when you shot them, were you aware of the parallels, or the areas where the stories kind of imitate each other or brush up against each other? Was all of that in the script?

Yeah, we were really aware of that. Those were things that Scott and David were very precisely orchestrating. It’s all there in the script. It’s not like we just shot two different stories and then mingled them together in the editing room. That’s, I think, where a lot of the most beautiful and telling parts of the movie are, in the juxtapositions between what’s happening in one world and what’s happening right at the same time in the other world. Which is a construct that definitely doesn’t exist in your more conventional movie, and I think it’s one of the most stimulating aspects of this one.

Since you shot the Yellow story first, that must have affected the experience of shooting the Green story.

Yeah, definitely. I think it raised the stakes. And I think we weren’t forced to make those Green scenes real dramatic, you know what I mean? The stakes were already so high, the tension and intensity of the movie were there already. We’d done that, we’d been yelling and running and shit. I think that gave us the freedom and confidence to let the Green scenes be very organic and natural, not force them. Often what happens in drama is that people don’t want them to be boring, you know? So they try real hard to make it really intense. The truth is, that’s not how a lot of those conversations really go.

I understand you and Lynn Collins and the directors did an unusual amount of rehearsal before the shoot.

Yeah, we did a lot of rehearsal. We spent a solid month hanging out, walking around New York, going to different places, talking about the characters and playing some of the scenes. We also played out a lot of scenes that weren’t in the story, stuff that happened before the story takes place: How the characters met, how they fell in love, what it was like the first time they had sex, when they first started getting serious. We had all that under our belts by the time we started shooting.

And wasn’t there some kismet at work in the casting too? You and Lynn are so great together, and I’ve heard that you auditioned together, even though you hadn’t even met each other before.

Pretty much. I think we had met before, but we didn’t really know each other at all. We auditioned together, and that audition was one of the favorite audition experiences of my life. I’ve been on a lot of fucking auditions, and to be honest auditions are generally devoid of any creative spark. [Laughter.] Everyone understands that it’s a process you have to do, but it’s not ideal. You’re in some office and you’re reading some scene in the wrong place or whatever. This audition was just Scott and David and me and Lynn — and I still feel like it was some of my favorite acting I’ve ever done. It was just really immediate and resonant. I loved it. As soon as we were done with that, I was like, “I really want to do this. I hope they let me do this. I hope they let me do this with her.”

Filmmaking is so mysterious in that way. Some directors rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and some don’t want to rehearse at all — show up, do the scene in a take or two, and go home.

Yeah, in “Mysterious Skin” we didn’t rehearse, almost at all, and I think it was a wise choice for that movie. Filmmaking is like catching lightning in a bottle. You only have to capture that thing once, and then you have it. So you do whatever needs doing to try to ramp up to it happening right then and there. You don’t want it to happen before the cameras are rolling.

“Uncertainty” was different from a normal rehearsal process because “Uncertainty” is different from a normal filmmaking process. The scenes weren’t written, so you could almost classify the rehearsing as writing. Not that we were writing anything, but we were creating what the movie was going to be, not just practicing what we already knew it was going to be.

“Uncertainty” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand via IFC In Theaters, on many cable-TV systems.