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Insomnia
***1/2
Cinema Releases - August 30, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
118 minutes. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Hillary Seitz; based
on the 1997 screenplay by Nikolai Frobenius, Erik Skjolbjaerg. Starring Al
Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney, Martin Donovan, Nicky
Katt, Paul Dooley, Jonathan Jackson.
"A bad cop can't sleep because his conscience
won't let him. A good cop can't sleep because there's still a piece of the
puzzle missing."
So says Will Dormer at the start of
"Insomnia", and the movie is about whether or not he is a good
cop. He himself doesn't know any more. We get the sense that he feels naked
before God, as if he's being judged and crumbling under the
pressure.
Played by Al Pacino, Dormer is a homicide detective
from Los Angeles, legendary across many departments. He's in the town of
Nightmute, Alaska to assist with a baffling local case involving the death
of a teenage girl. Back home he's got an internal affairs investigation hanging
around his head, and he doesn't like his options. Then there is an accident
whose details I will not reveal: it might solve his problems, or might make
them worse, and Dormer helps the likelihood of things going badly by stupidly
falsifying a cover story.
Nightmute is in a curious part of the world, where
the sky stays light for one half of the year and goes pitch black for the
other. Right now, it's bright. Dormer puts pillows all over his windows,
covers his head, drinks whisky and probably counts a lot of sheep, but none
of it works. As the daze of tiredness surrounds his head and days pile on
top of each other, the flow of his mind takes unruly turns. Voices and sights
are hazy, thoughts seem surreal, memory plays fundamental tricks. Dormer
begins to wonder if his mistake was really an accident.
Then comes the encounter with the killer of the
teenage girl, played with disturbing serenity by Robin Williams as a man
who knows the simple tricks of suggestiveness that will play with Dormer's
mind. He calls Dormer at strange hours of the night, musing that he and the
cop share the camaraderie of insomnia. He questions Dormer's motives, proposes
mutually beneficial scams, stays evasive but looming. And sometimes he talks
about the dead girl, with knowingness, affection, and the underlying conviction
that yes, he may have killed her, but he was not violent, he was a
friend.
"Insomnia" is a complex thriller and police
procedural, but its convolutions are used to define situations and demonstrate
the dilemmas trapped inside Dormer's mind. Not unlike last year's "The Pledge"
-- which starred another great American actor, Jack Nicholson, as a troubled
cop on the hunt for a child killer -- the film is more interested in being
a character study than using a complex web of events to gyp us around with
clever plotting. The source material is a Norweigan film starring Stellan
Skarsgard from 1997, which I have not seen but will be checking out as soon
as possible.
Christopher Nolan, who directed, impressed many
moviegoers with his debut "Memento", which used a backward structure to
demonstrate the internal hell of a man with no short-term memory attempting
to achieve a quest for vengeance. This time we get a relentlessly linear
structure of quiet, unmoving stillness: Nolan's shots stay so eerily calm
and bright that it seems there's no rhythm of life to which Dormer can turn
when his brain chemicals cause pain. He's stuck in his unsolvable
rut.
The gruff central performance by Pacino is of
course excellent; he enters authoritatively, knowing what he needs to know,
seeming experienced and in control, and ends up fumbling and fearful, as
stress spins without sense or resolution. Pacino is not exactly an old man,
but he knows how to use his age, his voice, his eyes and even the way he
plays with his hair, to make himself look a physical and mental mess, as
his character questions all his own facets and finds it impossible to get
any kind of ease.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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