By all means, let’s keep talking about Inception: What a pleasure it is, in this arid summer for big movies, to have a big movie out worth talking about! (Anyone have anything to talk about in the matter of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? Anyone?) If you’d like to take a break, though, from the topic of the architecture of Inception and What It All Means (or does it?), I suggest detouring to a discussion of the role of Marion Cotillard’s Mal, the dead wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom. For one thing, the topic allows me to include a photo of Marion Cotillard, a Frenchwoman of arresting beauty with a gaze unnerving enough to throw her audience into reveries. And for another, there’s something about Mal that intrigues me, bothers me, and otherwise haunts my waking hours.
I commented in my review about the particular resonance of the character’s name, with a spelling — Mal — that connotes evil and a pronunciation — Moll — echoing slang that mean’s a gangster’s girlfriend. What I didn’t consider at the time is the notion that, in fundamental ways, Mal drives the whole story. Because Dom feels guilty about Mal’s death, she intrudes on his subconscious. Because she intrudes on his subconscious, she affects both his waking and his sleeping life. Because she destabilizes his dreams — showing up univited brandishing knives, guns, and invitations to suicide — Mal is the most powerful element in Dom’s universe. She’s also, arguably, the only player on Christopher Nolan’s whole chess board who expresses spontaneous passion rather than contained, intellectualized emotion: When she’s needy, or angry, she weeps or brandishes a weapon. Sometimes both. (When Cillian Murphy’s character, Robert Fischer, feels something about his dying father, he blinks once and checks his smartphone.)
And yet. And yet for all Cotillard’s glares and crystalline tears, I never really feel Mal’s pain, because I don’t for a minute believe The Dead Wife was ever a real half of a couple, bound by recognizable human intimacy. Of course, you could argue that Inception is not supposed to be a movie about real characters, especially not when one is called “the architect,” one is called “the forger,” etc. But if the woman played by Cotillard is supposed to stand in for little more than The Dead Wife then…why is she such a destructive force? Why does she invade her husband’s sleep, ruin his work, make such a mess everywhere she shows up? Why must she be a Tragic Wife as well? Mal is one of all of two female characters in the whole picture, and she’s a nightmare.
She looks beautiful, though, right?
Lisa you are on a roll!! keep it coming!!!
That last line was pretty hilarious. She’s gorgeous.
Mal is one of the best things about Inception. And Cotillard is on FIRE!
Did I say how freakin’ hot she is? I did? OK.
You don’t even mention that Nolan conveniently uses Edith Piaf’s “Non Je Ne Regreette Rien”? A song that Cotillard famously sang just a couple years ago to win an Oscar. In this film, the song is used as the characters’ pullback into reality…and Cotillard’s character is anything but.
I loved the film, but it was sad that the only two female characters are basically window dressing. Ellen Page is an expository device, and Cotillard is a ghost, a memory, and a sprite. Sure, her face drives Cobb, but once again, a big Hollywood film uses a female character as a device to move the male character’s plot along and to enhance his plight, to frame his character arc. After the astonishing, Oscar-winning job she did in La Vie En Rose, it’s sad that Cotillard has only been cast by Hollywood in “girlfriend” roles for big Hollywood leading men. When are we gonna see a Hollywood film in which she is the LEAD and the proactive, main driving force in her own story?
Totally. Loved the film to pieces, but once again, Nolan can’t seem to flesh out female characters well, All his films feature women that are defined by their relationship to the leading men, I hope that someday Nolan writes a film in which the main character is a woman.
i love her but both her and penelope cruz are limited in the roles they can play in american movies because their english is affected by their french/spanish speaking backgrounds. their characters must either be minor or the whole character must be changed to explain the accent. she was great in this role, and honestly, Mal is more than just window dressing
And that is a big problem with American screenwriters. Why does every film have to be about perfectly accented American characters? Why can’t they write more characters of diverse backgrounds?
Marion Cotillard? Actually, I thought she was magnificent. And her role is meant to call into question so, so many things within the story. Her own clues (Mal’s) and Marion’s performance are fine — as in exquisite. My only regret is that some people missed it entirely. Ellen Page? Meh, serviceable role/perf.
Cotillard isn’t just the girlfriend. Aside from DiCaprio’s, I thought Cotillard and Ellen Page had the best, most complex roles in the movie.
But the main character is a male, so it’s kind of impossible for the other characters not to be defined by their relationship to the main character. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have a reason to be in the movie.
You mean a movie that DOESN’T have Angelina Jolie as the main role? LOL. Who knows.
But to be honest, I felt that Page’s character Ariande was actually a step in the right direction. Sure, all we know is her intelligence and her role, (and she wasn’t the key character) but she’s more essential to the movie that you’re making her out to be. Ariadne, and only Ariadne, is the one person that discovers Cobb’s demons – demons that are essential to the whole movie, and detrimental to the mission as a whole. And we, the audience, see this in her eyes. She movies the plot – and she does it without having a romance, without being associated with a single guy. Ariadne’s intellect and skills were what was lauded in this movie – The Architect could have easily been a male. Her gender wasn’t even considered. She was simply Cobb’s father’s “best student” and she happened to be female.
I also feel Ariadne’s role has symbolic allegorical roots. Remember the Greek legend about the Minotaur? The Minotaur in this movie is Mal.
I personally thought Cotillard was brilliant. She evoked the feeling of fear in me for that brief moment when Cobb and Ariadne rushed to the elevator in Cobb’s dream.
Man, did she rock that black dress…
Hmmm… We the audience only needed to feel and know they were happy in the past and she is crazed “now”. Her performance works within the confines of her character’s role in the story.
It’s because she is his projection. She’s angry because she’s a personification of his guilt. His contained emotions are because he can’t “trust” them if you will. He’s overly intellectual to hide from this pain.
Exactly. Not really sure what people are complaining about.
This is exactly right. We never see Mal in the movie, we see her husband’s vision of her, and no person in somebody’s life, especially someone emotionally tied to her, conceives of her exactly as she is. She is–she can only be–envisioned through prisms of Dom’s love, passion, expectations, regrets, guilt, defensiveness, fear, nostalgia, etc. etc. etc. We don’t know precisely who Mal really was, but we know that Dom’s experience of her and her death was so destabilizing and haunting that those feelings break through in images of violence. But what we’re seeing in the violent displays tell us more about Dom, whose mind they spring from, than they do about Mal herself.
Exactly.
I could read a book about this without finding such real-world aporapches!
I, too, felt like Marion Cotillard’s character was the one who expressed madness that some people found lacking. Nolan really conceptualized a neorealistic vision of “dreams,” and it’s ruled by order. Given that Paris explodes when the order they create “falls apart”, maybe the lack of constraints on Mal is part of what makes her challenging in his work.
I do find it interesting that Joseph G-L’s character said she was “lovely” in life.
Many people say that Satio(Ken Wantanabe) was the villian, but I think Mal was. Before they went into limbo she was “lovely” as stated by DarkLayers. But once they were in limbo for so long, Mal went crazy and thought reality was another dream level.
I think she is angry and sad and violent bc she represents the guilt that Dom feels towards her in her death. We never really see the ‘real, living’ Mal…only Dom’s version of her in his dreams. And becaues he feels nothing but guilt over her death, he creates as a creature that wants to ruin him and prolong that guilt.
Precisely. The Mal that we see in the movie is NOT the Mal that existed in real life, as shown by Arthur’s (The Point Man’s) comment that “she was lovely.” In real life. Mal is called “The Shade” for a reason. She is quite simply a manifestation of every single emotion Cobb feels in regards to her death, and perhaps bits and pieces of the Mal that Cobb remembers before she committed suicide, since that Mal was going insane. I mean – setting up her own suicide so it looks like a homicide pinned on her husband? That’s not a “lovely” woman. That’s a woman going insane.
The Mal we see in the movie is not intended to be the person to whom Cobb was married. Rather, she is the embodiment of Cobb’s guilt and anger which he feels towards himself because he caused her suicide. She’s the embodiment of one idea floating around in his mind. She’s not meant to be a whole person. She’s not intended to be a person at all.
Exactly. Well put.
I like this idea. We were never shown her outside of Dom’s dreams/feelings. I don’t think Mal as a person was a ‘nightmare’, I think put in the confines of Dom’s subconcious she’s a nightmare- but it’s not really her.
Yes – plus, at the end of the film where she’s trying to convince him to stay with her, he says something like, ‘you’re not my wife. You’re just a shadow or shade.’ I took that to mean that this is not only a projection of his guilt, but that he was acknowledging this was just one tiny sliver of her complex personality.
I agree. Mal in the dreams is not Mal, but Dom and his self hatred for what he did to Mal.
I thought Marion Cotillard did a phenomenal job. Truly riveting.
When you see her vulnerability as Dom manipulates the real mad, her ensuing craziness as a result, and then finally as the harsh projection in his mind, it’s all fantastic. These scenes occur so out of order though I think it may be hard to attach to the character. We come to know the dark projection of Mal before we see the real Mal that Dom led to a mental breakdown unintentionally.
I don’t think we ever see the real Mal. I subscribe to the theory that the entire movie is Dom’s dream. Even the “real” layer has elements of dreams (the narrow passage, Saito’s incredibly timed saving him, the fuzzy rules regarding the inceptions, Michael Caine’s lines about waking up, the oddness of Mal committing suicicde across an alley when she should have been in the window Cobb was in — I’m sure there’s more but I’d need to see it again). If my theory is right (and I don’t insist on it, just what I think) then Mal as we see her is ALWAYS an embodiment of Cobb’s inner turmoil about her. As such, she ISN’T really a person at all but an idea of one, a metaphor for Cobb’s feelings.
Saito is really Mal trying to help Cobb get out of Limbo
*** SPOILER-Y ***
I think it’s a /very/ interesting thought, that Marion Cotillard did not play a representation of Cobb’s wife… but, in fact, played a representation of Cobb himself. That she was the embodiment of his guilt and madness that infected him after his wife’s death. He put her face on that madness, to make it a vicious circle. When he kills her/lets her die, he destroys that part of himself…
Interesting. Oh gee darn, now I’ll have to go see the movie again. Awww. Poor me.
Definitely. Mal is not really Mal. She is a projection not a person. It’s the projection that is so destructive and actually, the projection is just an after effect of the original Inception. So really it’s Inception driving the movie & creating a destructive force.
BINGO!!!
That’s exactly what I was going to say. Well, that and anyone with eyes could tell Marion Cotillard is gorgeous. Does anyone else think she deserves and Oscar nom. for this?
She did a great job in the movie but I don’t think she deserves an Oscar nom for it.
Yes…and she will get it..not many people understand the complexities of her character and how well she conveyed them.Besides that,she was the only character who brought the heart to the movie that we need to round things out a bit more.
I completely agree…I think the comment about her being “lovely” in real life and the way he says it is an indication that this is not the “real” mal, but Cobb’s dream/subconscious view of her, which the subconscious has contorted with Cobb’s guilt and anger over their “real” relationship. And as discussed in the movie, the subconscious cannot be controlled the say the conscious mind can be. Mal is therefore an uncontrolled variable
Right, it’s interesting that we never actually see the real Mal, as she was when she was alive, only that we hear of how she was “lovely” back then.
I agree as well. Remember, Arthur said that when Mal was alive, she was “Lovely.” The Mal that the audience witnesses is not the “real” Mal–in fact no one really knows the real Mal except for Nolan, who created her. The Mal we see–how she acts, everything–is all a part of Dom’s subconcious.
This was an amazing film, and I love all of the discussion that has followed.
Yes, this is the Mal of Dom’s mind, tormenting and haunting him. Not the real Mal. It would have been interesting if they could have fit that in somewhere though…the real Mal.
I agree with this sentiment — with one exception. There was something about the Mal who shot Fischer, something which made me question if that was indeed the coy Mal which had haunted Cobb’s dreams. I know, I know, it’s just … an idea.
not sure where you are going with this,but definitely intrigued…can you elaborate?
Exactly. Seriously, what is the deal with the staff at ew.com not picking up on what is so very clear and obvious with Inception? Of course we don’t really know Mal. We never meet Mal! Good grief.
It’s frustrating, isn’t it?
I felt she was bad, because I could never connect with her pain – their pain even. While I felt for Dom, the connection between the two wasnt enough. She seemed so antagonistic I couldnt help but feel she was bad.
But, as DarkLayers says above, the most interesting part was when Arthur said she was “lovely” in life. I just couldnt see it in the dream state.
yeah, her antagonism really turned me off (even though Marion did a great performance). i wanted to cheer out loud in the theater when Ariadne shot her.
I think the key to remember (and it is very easy to forget) is that was NOT Mal. It was Cobb’s mental projection of her, or whatever you want to call it. And he admitted at the end that the “Mal” in the dreams isn’t quite right. I think he used the word “shadow” of herself, or whatever. She is the representation of his guilt. SHE isn’t the “nightmare.” The guilt is. It’s just coming through in his dreams in the form of Mal. In “real life,” when she was alive, she probably was “lovely” as JGL’s character said. But we never got to see her. We only saw Cobb’s guilt.
I think the reason she doesn’t seem like part of couple, like a real fully-formed woman is that she isn’t. She isn’t a person, but is the manifestation of Dom’s grief. She’s a powerful projection, his dark side, his anger and grief over his loss and love. She’s his bad, his “mal.” She his wife, and that’s what he finally comes to terms with in the end.
She’s gorgeous!
I felt Cillian Murphy’s performance as Fischer was much more than “blink his eyes and looks at his smartphone”. I think he had one of the most difficult characters to pull off.
I agree – he really drew me in, despite the fact we knew so little about his character. It might be due not only to talent, though – it’s also his weird beauty.
She meant his character was emotionally disaffected. Not that his performance was bad. BTW, he’s super hot!
all Cillian needs to do is look with his big beautiful eyes and i am riveted
Well, he didn’t have the best relationship with his father and probably felt that showing emotion was a sign of weakness. I liked his character and thought it was well acted.
I agree. I was really surprised by how emotional Cillian Murphy’s role was considering he tends to get stuck with weird villains.
Whoops, I meant @4k4k
did you really just write that? ugh. what a rock of feministic bs. i found mal completely compelling in inception as moreover, a projection and refelction of dom’s grief and guilt. we don’t ever get to “see” this charcter because SHE ISN’T REAL. i thought cotillard was stunning and did an amazing job balancing the character…and i really wish you and the glieb would stop finding ways to trash a movie you apparently didn’t understand or buy into.
The first two lines of her article read:
By all means, let’s keep talking about Inception: What a pleasure it is to have a big movie out worth talking about!
Settle down. She’s not trashing it at all. It’s called initiating a discussion. Instead of insulting the talent, try focusing on the questions posed.
I didn’t get that she was trashing the movie at all
I agree, he’s not trashing the flick — however I take umbrage with her view on Mal. Maybe open needs to not be professional critic to feel the (vacillating) emotion in the character and performance. Or, maybe you just need to have a heart. YMMV.
(er, *she’s not trashing…)
Right! And Ariadne’s role was absolutely relevant…not window dressing at all!
I saw the name “Mal” in a different light, as a reference to a grand mal or a petit mal seizure- an aberrant arrest of the brain, something Dom couldn’t control but intruded on him suddenly, spasming, often destructive but with an accompanying euphoria.
interesting … especially when you pared with the movie’s explanation of the uncontrolled power of the subconscious.
very interesting, but a character named “mal” (literally, bad) when it could have easily been “malle”?
Wow – I think you’re right. Given the allegory of Ariadne, the double symbolism using the Piaf song (other than being traced back to Marion (which I’ve read was unintentional), the BRAAAAAAAM sound we’ve all come to associate with this movie is the brass of this same song slowed down. There’s a clip on youtube proving this), I can totally subscribe to this.
Wow, you guys don’t get it. Mal was right all along. They were stuck in Level one, so she jumped out the window, and woke up. She then tried to wake u Cobb by performing inception on him.
That’s just one theory.
..to which I also subscribe.
Don’t say we don’t get it. That’s just one theory. It’s one that I see the proof of, but I don’t subscribe to it.
She looks beyond beautiful. Marion Cotillard is more stunning in every movie she appears in.