I don't think this is totally fair.
I think he gets penalized because his films have the air of cinephilia and intellectualism but don't really hold up under the scrutiny of consideration.
How "fair" it is depends on who you think we're talking about, I suppose. Who do you have in mind in the description above? Most people? Most people here? Just yourself? I don't deny that some people react exactly as you say. But people also react exactly as I say. We're speaking generally here.
I think real art house stuff
routinely fails to "hold up," at least in some kind of plot coherence sense, but people who like art house films tend to let that go because they admire the vibe, aesthetic, or audacity. In the same way our reaction to some band playing in a hole-in-the-wall is probably going to be a lot more generous than our reaction to the ones filling arenas. Try as we might, we can't disregard all the people we know like it, and bring our opinions of them into it, affecting our opinions of the work itself.
His third acts rarely pay off satisfactorily and it has never been more evident than in Inception. And, let's face it, Ariadne is a character created entirely so that Nolan can throw slow-pitch exposition of his ostensibly high concept at the average audience-member without striking them out, which is weak and actually makes me cringe when I watch the film.
As much as I hate exposition, it's pretty hard to find a film with any intellectual ambition at all that doesn't resort to it in some way, so I'm included to grade on a curve. Anyway, this isn't about whether
Inception is brilliant or perfect; as I said, I think it's closer to one of his middling efforts.
But I think it clearly gets judged more harshly because of its success, and as a (sometimes unconscious?) counterweight to the culture's admiration for it. The best comparison I can think of is when
The Matrix came out and all sorts of serious, philosophically-minded people felt the need to mock it because they saw a lot of teenagers overreacting to it because it happened to be their first exposure to some of the existential questions it poses.
I think Nolan gets points off not because he's too popular but because the reason he's so popular is because he never risks alienating the popular audience by challenging them too much, leaving "cinephiles" wanting every time despite his obvious mastery of craft.
Are we talking about Nolan or
Inception now? Because you say "never," which makes me think you're talking about his whole filmography. And if you don't think
Memento and
The Prestige are risking alienating anyone, then, respectfully, I'm not sure we're going to agree on anything here.
Inception is not an intellectual film that's accessible to mass audiences, it's actually kind of a mid-brow film masquerading as intellectual.
Right, this is the most common criticism: not some ridiculous inversion like "it's actually stupid," just the ol' "it's not as smart as it thinks it is." There's no way to litigate this, I can only offer my competing explanation, which is: I think if a film told exactly same story were told with a tenth of the budget by a French director 50 years ago, we'd be talking about how seminal it was. And I think he tackles stuff that very few directors can make accessible to this many tens of millions of people, and is so successful at it that he hurts himself with cinephiles by making it look easier than it is.