Unlike Memento, the movie that famously unfolded in reverse and put director Christopher Nolan on the map, the filmmaker's new project propels its story forward in a relentlessly linear manner. Insomnia has a structure that could even be called conventional, with a beginning, a middle and an end that appear in precisely that order.
What actually takes place during that beginning, middle and end is not nearly so conventional.
Memento had a grand old time screwing with our expectations by thrusting us deep inside the mindset of one of the most unreliable narrators ever — a man whose chronic lack of long-term memory made it impossible for him to know anything with any degree of certainty. In Insomnia (which is actually a remake of a nifty 1997 film from Norway), Nolan gives us a different variation on the same existential conundrum, crafting a thriller in which the hero becomes so sleep-deprived that he is unable to tell when he's crossed the line from good guy to bad guy. Then again, considering all the slabs of symbolism and metaphor shifting just under the film's surface like temperamental tectonic plates, it might just be the other way around: Maybe the main character's lack of moral clarity comes first and the insomnia is just a symptom, a convenient excuse for bad behavior.
It's a classic chicken and the egg dilemma and fertile ground for Nolan, a filmmaker whose unique sensibility has everything to do with the blurring of cause and effect. The sleep deprived protagonist in Insomnia is a veteran LAPD detective by the name of Will Dormer (Al Pacino), who's called in to a small Alaskan town to investigate the brutal murder of a teenage girl. Pacino uses that all-purpose not-quite-drawled non-accent he adopts whenever he's playing a character who's not a New Yorker. Otherwise, his performance here is a good one, happily free of most of those annoying, blustery ticks he's picked up over the years. As the movie progresses, Pacino's Dormer sleeps less and less, making worse and worse choices at every juncture. We're right there with him, cringing at the hole he seems powerless to avoid digging for himself and rooting for him to find a way out.
Insomnia is one of the darker films you'll see this year, but the hook here is that it's also one of the brightest. It's impossible to shut out the light in Insomnia, as the movie takes place during that time of year when the sun hovers in the Alaskan sky for 24 hours a day, never setting and never allowing the comforting respite of nightfall — a weird, sunny limbo state that leads directly to Dormer's inability to sleep. The town's name is Nightmute, by the way, as if the situation here weren't already clear as mud.
The light is everywhere in Insomnia, even in the dark and dingy rooms where much of the action takes place. You see the light seeping in through cracks, bleeding around the edges of doors and windows, threatening to burst in from behind the drapes, blinds and shutters that aren't quite up to doing their job. So much of what happens in Nolan's new film is a trick of the light, from the physical confusion between day and night, to the ambiguous moral shifts of its characters, to the opening credits that fade in and out like sunspots, blobs of bright darkness that flare up and then disappear on a white-hot field.
Much like the recent cult fave The Deep End, another remake of classic noir-ish material, the story in Insomnia hinges on a small moment in time when the central character — in both cases a decent person, or at least an ordinary one — makes one wrong move and unwittingly initiates a chain reaction whereby everything changes for the worse. In Dormer's case, things begin going wrong not from the moment he accidentally shoots his partner to death in the confusion of a heated chase — but from the moment he starts lying about the shooting. After a few days of no sleep, an increasingly disoriented Dormer is lying about everything, even about his inability to doze off.
What Dormer seems to have done, the film repeatedly tells us, is to cross one of those lines from which there's no going back. Insomnia drives the point home by setting up a flip-sides-of-the-same-coin scenario between an increasingly conflicted Dormer and his nemesis, a delusional murder suspect played by Robin Williams (continuing here to distance himself from the nice guy image he's been systematically chipping away at in Death to Smoochy and the upcoming One Hour Photo).
Both men may have committed murders for which they refuse to accept responsibility, and the movie gets lots of mileage out of focusing on the actions that seem to bind this unlikely pair. It's not a completely fair comparison, but the relationship is an interesting one, since Dormer's inability to extricate himself from his own complicated cover-up threatens to put him in pretty much the same boat as Williams' creepy character.
One of the most obvious pleasures of Insomnia is Pacino's performance, which involves some serious mental, moral and even physical deterioration over the course of the film. Dormer (is the name another too-clever pun, this one on the French word for sleep?) is like some distant cousin to a vampire being slowly destroyed by an overload of sunlight but sucking all the deadly brightness into himself. After four or five days of this sort of high stress and no sleep, he starts looking like some honorary member of the walking dead or maybe even a victim of radiation poisoning. Like some latter day Dorian Gray, you can practically see the sense of right-wrong bending and boiling away inside Dormer with each new crevice and cranny on the poor guy's face.
Good as Pacino's performance is, though, his movie star charisma ultimately hinders the film from getting all the way under our skins. Pacino's just a little too easy to like, even at his most dislikable. Dormer's character never quite makes the transformation from folksy hero cop to the reptilian Anti-Serpico that would have made this a much creepier movie, and certainly a more interesting one.
In the original Norwegian version of Insomnia, Stellan Skarsgard, who has Pacino's role, is terrific as a guy who starts out unhinged and detached and then just spirals downward from there. Skarsgard's character is a complete moral blank. His performance is as icy and internalized as Pacino's is sympathetic and transparently human. Nolan and Pacino take the more traditional Hollywood approach: They want us to like Dormer's character (which we do), while Skarsgard just wants our skin to crawl and our brain cells to percolate. Both approaches have their merits, but given the choice between the unforgiving black hole of the original and the more gently collapsing star of the remake, I'd take my Insomnia straight up, thanks.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in May 22-28, 2002.
