Christopher Nolan (2002)
This psychological crime thriller is a remake of a Norwegian film of 1997, directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg and starring Stellan Skarsgård. The action is moved to Alaska in summer – necessary because unrelenting daylight is important to the plot and in sustaining the main character’s guilty sleeplessness. In other respects, the American relocation of the story makes less sense. I was surprised that top Los Angeles detectives were roped in to help solve the murder of a teenage girl called Kay Connell in a small Alaskan fishing town, which has the fine name of Nightmute: the reason they’re from LA seems to be that their investigation by Internal Affairs is crucial to the plotting and LAPD is a byword for suspected police corruption. It’s odd too that, in the vastness of the USA, Detective Will Dormer’s celebrity is such that Ellie Burr, a rookie officer in the Nightmute police, is awestruck to be working with him: she knows his casebook off by heart and wrote her college dissertation on murders that Dormer solved. This too is necessary, however, because Ellie has to learn a series of lessons – (a) that her idol has feet of clay, (b) that she’s a good detective herself, (c) that doing the morally correct thing can involve tough choices.
Dormer (Al Pacino) has seen it all and knows it all too: he puts the dim locals, except for Ellie (Hilary Swank), to shame. Hillary Seitz’s screenplay, adapted from the one that Skjoldbjaerg and Nikolaj Frobenius wrote for the original, turns on Dormer’s shooting dead his LAPD partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) during a fogbound attempt to trap Kay’s murderer and depends on the neat ironies that result from this. The cop tracking down a killer has to conceal the homicide that he himself has committed. The killer, an eccentric writer of crime thrillers called Walter Finch (Robin Williams), who lives locally, is the only person who saw what happened in the fog and who proposes to Dormer that they both conceal what they know of the other and frame Kay’s egregious boyfriend (Jonathan Jackson) for her murder. What comes naturally to Dormer – to find killers and get them convicted – is just what he can’t easily do in the circumstances, although he’s still able to plant evidence. (It seems he can always intuit who’s committed a murder but sometimes needs to take illegal measures to back up his intuition.) Insomnia is reasonably entertaining and occasionally exciting – especially in a sequence in which Dormer chases Finch (with both actors well stricken in years the gripping pursuit is nearly comical too). The film’s bombastic qualities make it less enjoyable – and less good – than it might be, though. David Julyan’s portentously bleak music locks you into the schema; and although the landscape (actually British Columbia) is strikingly photographed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s determination, even a decade ago, to make every shot a highlight means that he seems to be fighting with the actors for the upper hand.
Al Pacino’s reaction to Dormer’s shooting of Eckhart is remarkable: it sticks in your mind and returns with full impact when Dormer admits he’s no longer sure it wasn’t intentional. (Eckhart was about to accept an immunity deal with Internal Affairs in exchange for information about one of Dormer’s past misdemeanours, in which Eckhart was complicit.) Otherwise, Pacino’s bug-eyed, sleep-starved face is magnetic yet you feel this role comes too easily to him. The same goes for Robin Williams as the pathetic but lethal Finch, although Williams’ presence is refreshing when he first enters the movie. Hilary Swank gives a strong, if unsurprising, performance as Ellie. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Eckhart is dispatched: Martin Donovan who plays him isn’t well enough known to sustain a leading role in this company. That excellent character actor Paul Dooley, as the local police chief, and Maura Tierney, as a taking-it-all-in hotel manager, are good in smaller roles.
13 July 2012
