The Line Between Comedy and Drama

 Is finer than you'd think.

Yesterday, I watched Chris Nolan's Inception for the first time. Absolutely loved it. Great film, managed to avoid spoilers so the twists landed, and the ending was great. 

I think the basic plot is ubiquitous enough to remove any need to summarize it, and the movie is 11 years old now, so I'll be spoiling everything. Basically, I loved pretty much every minute of the film except for one moment in particular.

When we first see the scene were Mal commits suicide, DiCaprio's reaction made me genuinely laugh. It's supposed to be an incredibly sad and tragic scene, where we discover his whole motivation in the movie thus far. It explains why he's on the run, and provides context for scenes we've seen already. But as great an actor as DiCaprio is, the script completely screwed him over. The passion with which he conveys emotion only served to make the scene more funny to me. 

The way comedy works is to build up catharsis, and subvert that build-up with a punchline. Drama is the same way, but the "punchline", instead of subverting the buildup, resonates with it. 

I wrote a scene for a sci-fi movie once, where a civil war is going on and a rebel has to escort a spy into the capital, so he can gain the trust of the dictator they're trying to overthrow. Unfortunately, the shuttle cruiser transporting them crashes somewhere in the desert, killing everyone aboard but the rebel. Once he makes it back to civilization, he contacts the leader of the resistance, Kai Hir, to tell him what happened. The conversation goes like this:

REBEL: This is Arthur Vell, ID number 39401. Requesting direct access to Chief Kai. 

KAI: Patched in. What is it? 

REBEL: Sir, I have terrible news. Our transport crashed out in the desert. Edward [the spy] is dead.

KAI: No! What happened?

REBEL: I don't know! One moment we were sitting pretty, the next one of the engines caught fire.

KAI: [Expletive]. Are you sure he's dead? You didn't try to save him?

REBEL: No, sir.

KAI: Why?

REBEL: I couldn't pick him out from the other burned corpses.

Now, I meant for this to be a very serious scene, as it kickstarts the plot and sets the tone of the movie. The image of an entire shuttle going down in flames, roasting everyone alive is horrifying... usually. But you see, the way the scene builds tension, in that we don't know what happened, but that it's bad, makes the last line too comical. It's not just bad, it's ridiculously bad. It's so incredibly bad that the entire shuttle is now full of burned corpses, and the rebel's attempt to save the spy was hilariously futile. 

I realized this when I went back over it later, and I rewrote the scene to give it much more gravitas, being careful to build everything up in a more dramatic way this time:

REBEL: Sir, I have terrible news. Our shuttle caught fire. Everyone aboard is dead. We crashed in the desert several hours ago. I just got back into comms range. 

KAI: No! You're telling me Edward is dead?

REBEL: Yes, sir. I'm sorry. There was nothing I could do.

KAI: What happened?!

REBEL: When we realized what was about to happen, we raced for the emergency exits. Our parachutes were all ready to go. Then the engine exploded, and the fuselage snapped like a twig. I was falling out into the sky, and I tried to pull him along with me, out of the way of the fireball. I was too late. By the time I found the wreckage... I couldn't even find the body.

Those last six words are the "punchline" of the scene, and they're dramatic because they resonate with the build-up we've established. Everyone's dead, he couldn't save the spy, and the shuttle went down in flames. Naturally, it would be very hard to find the body. 

So let's go back to this scene from Inception. We learn that Mal was consumed by the idea that her world wasn't real, and that it eventually led her to try to frame DiCaprio for her own suicide, so that he'd join her in the real world- the one they created in limbo, where they were like gods. On their anniversary, he finds their hotel room trashed, and Mal sitting on a ledge on the building across from his. After failing to persuade her to come back inside and talk to him, Mal jumps to her death.

DiCaprio's reaction is "Mal! No! Jesus Christ!"

I literally just went back and watched the scene, and it was still funny to me. Imagine watching your spouse fall to their death. Your first reaction would not be "No! Jesus Christ, goddamn it!" The first stage of grief is denial. 

If I had written the scene, I would've had him scream Mal's name just as she fell, before everything goes dead quiet. Instead of the dramatic music and DiCaprio's over-the-top performance, we get total silence and a shot of him staring down at her body and weeping. Then, maybe after a moment, enough sound comes back that we hear him cursing and calling out to her. 

The scene is much more dramatic when we learn that her speech about the train is actually what he said to her when they were leaving limbo, but that doesn't make his reaction any less funny. It's very similar to the moment Jennifer Lawrence finds out that Chris Pratt woke her up in the movie Passengers. The greatest actors in the world can't salvage a bad script. 

Anyhow, other than that, the movie is a 10/10 and DiCaprio does do a good job for most of it. My only regret is that Ariadne turned out to be a tranny.