The Bishop on Inception

It seems Leonardo DiCaprio is the great white hope of the American acting world. The Bishop had avoided the at-that-time promising actor since What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, taking a wide berth ’round the monster that was Titanic, crossing paths again only now to find him solid, watchable, doing all the things that Denzel Washington does, only better, sans the latter’s self awareness and an inability to tone down the stoicism that infected even Training Day.

Inception, described here and there as tricky enough to warrant two or more viewings, isn’t, as long as one is not uptight enough to want to parse every situation that appears on screen. It is not especially deep, either, unless one believes that all new(ish) things are deep. What it is is a tight, inventive sci-fi construct with the discipline to stick to its own rules, well shot, well scored, and, for what it’s worth, well performed. It is also sexy, and there’s nothing wrong with that—Barbara Stanwick would have been at home here. It has the confidence of a performance by Rachmaninov, slim but dense: ever, perhaps, hinting that something will go slightly awry which never does. And finally, it is different at a time when little is, and that makes it a thing worth doing in and of itself.