On Saturday afternoon, Kathleen and I went to see The Girl Who Played With Fire — the second installment of the Stieg Larsson adaptations. Kathleen was very annoyed by some changes that, in her view, were not only unnecessary but also distracting — perhaps “detracting” is the word. For myself, the movie was pleasant and engaging; Noomi Rapace has one of the truly great screen presences. (Although gifted with generally lovely features and truly amazing cheekbones, she can look plain and used up.) But, perhaps because I don’t think that it could stand on its own — which isn’t so much a fault as an accident of its mode of release — I wasn’t prompted to comment. The Girl Who Played With Fire certainly lacks what was for me the most powerful thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, that haunting photograph of the young Harriet Vanger (Julia Sporre) burning like a lighthouse at its center. Rarely has a still image been so evocatively deployed in a movie. (The only thing that comes to mind is the portrait of the missing heroine in Laura.) Niels Arden Oplev’s use of that photograph amounts to a kind of contract: no one with Harriet’s piercingly intelligent gaze could ever be murdered and dumped. But reassurance is missing from the second movie. Even though we know that she has to make it to the third installment, we can’t count on the survival of Lisbeth Salander herself. There is no hope within the movie. And if you know that the third and final installment picks up right where the second one ends, with Lisbeth and her monstrous father, Zala, in the same hospital, it’s difficult to see The Girl Who Played With Fire as having a genuine ending. It’s more a series of interesting episodes. Which is fine! But nothing to write here about.

The itch to see a film that would make me want to say something persisted, and this morning I succumbed to curiosity about Inception. I’m not going to waste much time distinguishing Inception, which I enjoyed, from Avatar, which I wouldn’t see; it’s enough to say that I wasn’t afraid that the new movie would offend me. As, indeed, it did not. But it did bore me, here and there. The ennui got particularly thick during the Alpine shoot-out scenes that I think were to represent an attack upon the subconscious of a godfather. I felt as though I were being forced to stare over someone’s shoulder at a video game. There was nothing in it for me. My interest in the good guys dropped to zero, so much so that I didn’t bother to sort out who was where or doing what. The gunfire was an obvious insurance policy, hedging against the risk that the story’s inventive theory of dreams would lose the young men in the audience. Actually, explicating the mechanics of invading the dreams of others risked losing everyone, because the job was assigned to Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m afraid that it is spectacularly difficult for me to connect Mr DiCaprio’s Cobb with the kind of sustained intellectual effort that mastering the art of “extraction” would require. And he was woefully shown up by the electrically bright Ellen Page, who as Ariadne plays the only character who is even halfway privy to her team leaders dark secrets, and who was able (as an actress) to put us in the picture every time she was obliged to scold Cobb for putting his people at uninformed risk. If Ariadne had been the one to tell us all about “Limbo,” I’m sure that we’d all have been far more terrified of the possibility of winding up there.

It’s a pity that Christopher Nolan doesn’t trust his cinematic virtuosity enough to have made what this movie might have been: a coruscating adventure story without either guns or spiels. He comes close, or at least he did so for me, in the layer of the climactic dream sandwich of dreams that takes place in a swank hotel. While the other characters dream down one level, their wool-suited bodies defenseless, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) remains behind to protect them. I had no idea what Mr Gordon-Levitt was doing throughout this sequence, but I didn’t mind; I was happy to watch him scramble about the corridors (sometimes along the ceiling) and up and down an elevator shaft, satisfied that he seemed to know what he was doing. (Mr Gordon-Levitt would have made a great Cobb, but I’d hate to lose him as Arthur.) The scene in which Cobb and Ariadne stroll through Paris, in a dream in which she re-invents the city while he populates it, is great visual fun, as is the crumbling city-by-the sea that represents the failure of the dream that Cobb shared with his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). But Mr Nolan’s adherence to the action-thriller playbook guarantees that the buds of his visual creativity never fully bloom. It seems churlish to complain about this; what’s wrong with a beautiful action-thriller. Well, nothing, except that, as an action-thriller, Inception is not very inventive.

We learn, at the end of Inception, that Cobb knows that it’s possible to plant an idea in someone’s brain because he has done it before, to his wife. The guilt that he feels flows from having so well convinced her that what seemed to be real life was also just a dream that she lost interest in it and took her life. Thus she bowed to the same Panglossian morality that assures us that people who could live forever would come to regard immortality as a curse. Life may be tough, but if it were any easier, we’d be really miserable. If life were a dream, it would be unlivable. Is this an interesting proposition? Most of us would unhesitatingly agree that mistaking life for a dream is a kind of pathology, an illness to be treated. We’re somatically rooted in a life that does not seem dream-like at all. But what if it were a dream? What if we could live forever? (Living in a dream world for eternity is, of course, the Abrahamic afterlife.) These are not grown-up questions, and making Marion Cotillard look wretched because she has been betrayed by one of them is sad diminishment. I’d have liked it better if she’d just been an all-out bad girl.

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