Release Date: May 24, 2002
Starring: Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Martin Donovan, Maura Tierney, Nicky Katt, Paul Dooley
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Hillary Seitz
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
MPAA Rating: R (language, some violence, brief nudity)
With Insomnia, it becomes clear that director Christopher Nolan is an emerging auteur, especially if seen shortly after his excellent inverted noir thriller Memento. Those who enjoyed Memento for its trickiness, its inventiveness, and its willingness to fly in the face of Hollywood’s narrative conventions will be understandably disappointed by Insomnia, for it is starkly linear compared to the director’s previous feature. But those who enjoyed Memento for its striking cinematography and dark atmosphere will find Insomnia another successful outing from Nolan, and one that captures the British director’s definitive style.
In some ways, it’s obvious that Nolan regards Insomnia as simply a style exercise, especially since it is more or less a shot-for-shot remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name starring Stellan Skarsgård and directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg.
For the Hollywood version, things have been strongly Americanized. The protagonist is now Will Dormer (Al Pacino), a Los Angeles police detective in exile because of an internal affairs investigation. His superiors have sent Dormer and his partner, Detective Hap Eckhardt (Martin Donovan, Living Out Loud), to the city of Nightmute, Alaska, as a favor to the local police force to help in investigating the brutal murder of a 17-year-old girl.
Dormer quickly finds a suspect -- local pulp novelist Walter Finch (Robin Williams) -- and sets a trap for him. But in the ensuing melee, Finch escapes and disappears into the foggy wilderness; Dormer gives chase but ends up shooting his partner by mistake. He covers up the death, because Eckhardt had planned to name him to internal affairs in Los Angeles, and the accident may appear to be very un-accidental, leading to the film’s ubiquitous subplot of honor and integrity among policemen.
Haunted by his partner’s death, and blackmailed by Finch, the only other person who saw what happened, Dormer finds it increasingly difficult to sleep. Going days on end without rest, his investigation begins to unravel, even as a local detective, Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank, who completes Nolan’s troika of Academy Award-winning actors), suspects Dormer in the particulars about Eckhardt’s death.
Pacino has always been an actor who appears to loll about the screen, even in his flamboyance, as though he is such a good actor that many roles are beneath him. Finally, he has a role in which he must actually act as though he is sleepwalking, and in so doing, he gives a very memorable performance. Watching him in Insomnia is to watch a talented veteran in action, something that is apparent from Dormer’s wonderful first scene at the morgue in Nightmute.
He also develops a noteworthy chemistry with Hilary Swank, and one that is underused (it’s also one of the few unique aspects of this remake -- Swank’s role in the Norwegian original was a stiffer, older, and more experienced policewoman, and there was virtually no chemistry to be found). Swank plays Burr off of Dormer like a daughter might play off a father; Burr idolizes Dormer, she tells him she studied his cases in the police academy, and hangs on his every word.
She even gets to play his ethical guardian angel later in the movie, reminding him that he once said, “A good cop can’t sleep because a piece of the puzzle is missing, and a bad cop can’t sleep because his conscience won’t let him.” He looks at her sideways with a smile and replies, “Sounds like something I’d say, doesn’t it?”
Yes, it does. In fact the only thing that really stinks about Insomnia is that it sounds and looks like a Hollywood production that sucked the marrow out of a more interesting foreign film. It’s not the first, it won’t be the last, and it’s unlikely that the majority of the mainstream audience for which Insomnia is made will be aware of the Norwegian version, so it’s hard to fault Nolan’s film for anything particular.
But the protagonist, Jonas Engström as played by Skarsgård but renamed Dormer (an interesting irony, given that the name summons the Latin verb dormio, to sleep, when Dormer does anything but) for Pacino, was a much more tormented individual in the 1997 film. Here, he’s been cleaned up a bit -- Pacino’s detective doesn’t force himself on women or watch teenagers having sex, and he shoots a dead dog instead of a live one, as Skarsgård’s did. Credit writer Hillary Seitz with giving the Dormer character a more thoughtful back-story, but it feels that in this drama about the rough jaggedness of humanity under extreme duress, the viewer is being cheated of something rawer.
Still, the American Insomnia works well enough. There won’t be very much suspense, since audiences going in will suspect the Robin Williams character of Walter Finch as early and as often as Dormer does (Williams is bland and ineffective as Finch, cultivating a false blend of creepiness and neurosis). In this sense, Nolan’s Insomnia is bred of the line of police thrillers that began with The French Connection -- not so much a mystery as a procedural, pumped up with atmospheric and stylistic choices made by the director.
Nolan knows how to do atmosphere and style. Although he does not capture insomnia as well as director Skjoldbjærg did in the original, he does get the bleakness of life above the Arctic Circle, and the isolation of the real-life city of Nightmute (for the purposes of the film, British Columbia has been substituted for Alaska), to come across. (Nightmute is another interesting and thematically-charged name.) It’s a toss-up as to whether audiences will subsequently be drawn to Alaska because of the wonderful photography or turned away because of the cold, damp loneliness.
Insomnia is no Memento, but it is a good movie. It will have viewers admiring Nolan’s talent for dark films (although in a classic example of Nolan’s ever-present wit, Insomnia is film noir without the noir); those who haven’t seen Memento will be intrigued and those who have will be eager for Nolan’s next movie.
all contents © 2002 Craig Roush