Flak Magazine: Review of Insomnia, 6-5-02

Insomnia takes place in Nightmute, Alaska, where the summer sun never really sets, and along those lines the movie's May release could be read as a joke — it's a brooding, melancholy piece of Oscar bait let loose during the high noon of blockbuster season. It maintains the courage of those convictions for most of its running time, only suggesting the kind of mass-audience compromise that typifies summer programming with its too-tidy final minutes.

A murder more gruesome than the local police force knows how to handle brings L.A. cops Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) up to the Last Frontier. Their trip is motivated by more than just helpfulness; an internal affairs investigation in California is circling around the celebrated Dormer, and it looks like the straight-laced Eckhart may dish on one of the senior cop's indiscretions. So: temporary banishment to Alaska, where they set a trap that the killer falls for, but as the police close in, the killer escapes in the fog, and during the ensuing chase, Dormer shoots and kills Eckhart. It's an apparent accident, but it lends credence to the possibility of Dormer's corruption as surely as hard evidence, and so Dormer covers up his crime, blaming the killer — but the killer (Robin Williams) saw the whole thing, and, viewing his own crime as similarly un-premeditated, offers not to put the whammy on the cop if the cop (the first and only person able to finger the murderer) frames someone else for his murder.

This is a good little Hitchcockian knot from which to build a story — it's actually the second take on the material in five years, with director Christopher Nolan and screenwriter Hillary Seitz adapting Erik Skjoldbærg's 1997 Scandinavian thriller of the same name. And while all remakes should be judged on their own terms, there's no getting around the fact that it's Seitz's decision to include a police corruption subplot that ends up overshadowing the more potent tale of human corruption beneath it.

That the movie communicates so much humanity can be largely attributed to its stars. Insomnia is semi-renowned as being the second movie in the Robin Williams Trilogy of Terror — that is, three movies released in the same six months that allege to "reinvent" Williams by showcasing the actor's "darker" side. (The last is the stalker thriller One-Hour Photo.) It's a career resuscitation many consider in order, on the premise that Williams has given himself over too much to schmaltz — his last five starring roles before this year were Bicentennial Man, Jakob the Liar, Patch Adams, What Dreams May Come and Good Will Hunting, all of which basically hinge on just how perfect Williams' love is, and doesn't that make you just wanna love him? His roles have been increasingly defined by their emotional neediness, a desperation to be liked that seems to come too naturally to Williams to simply be Method acting. The first of Williams' 2002 movies, the criminally dumped-upon Death to Smoochy, deftly parodied his privation but didn't subvert it — and, likewise, Williams wasn't expanding his range so much as (re-)inserting "motherfucker" into his vocabulary.

While we do get a new, or at least mostly unfamiliar, Williams in Insomnia, his performance's heft is rooted in the same hunger for approval. This is hardly an aspect of the human experience on which Williams can claim to have cornered the market, but there is a psychic ghost image of all of his mad mugging over every one of his nervous, muted line readings, and it makes his desire to win Dormer's complicity all the more palpable. There's more glee than anxiety in his Walter Finch: "Finally! Someone who knows where I'm coming from." It's one of the more successful movie-star reconceptions in recent memory.

Williams is a perfect foil for Pacino, who approaches his role without any of the mania or hoo-ha that sometimes curdles his performances. No major star communicates world-weariness so effortlessly; that crevassed, seen-it-all face is one of the many things that cinematographer Wally Pfister captures for maximum affect. Pfister is from Nolan's Memento, as is editor Dody Dorn; the same way that they worked with the director there to convey Guy Pearce's memory loss, they smartly capture Pacino's increasing disorientation as his lack of sleep gnaws away his sanity — light bleeds into the frame, cuts stutter and Pacino seems convincingly, utterly lost. The light/guilt thing may be obvious, but it's gangbusters.

The big "but" here is that, as worthy a topic as guilt is, and as skillfully as the filmmakers explore it, there's a layer of empathy lost by making Dormer a corrupt police officer — it's an anti-humanizing character trait. This is not to say that police officers aren't human or worthy of sympathy or that their failings make them less human — or, perhaps most critically, that Pacino doesn't play the dirty cop brilliantly, because he does — but when it comes to movies in 2002, could anything be more tiresome than a police officer who plants evidence in order to cinch a conviction for a suspect "known" to be guilty? Why couldn't Will suspect Hap was sleeping with his wife, or why couldn't Will be sleeping with Hap's wife, or why couldn't Hap just get on Will's nerves? A story choice like that would keep Insomnia fully in the realm of drama while providing the necessary ambiguity of was-it-intentional? that the movie spins around. Nolan and company are equipped to deal with that, and the moral dilemma would be all the keener by stripping off the utilitarian question of Dormer concealing his criminality to prevent a rash of likely successful appeals from those he'd imprisoned. The movie gets points for showing how easily and shrewdly the corrupt Dormer lapses into evidence tampering to cover his crime, but it's the only bit of thoughtfulness that the movie contributes (and therefore the only, meager measure of insight it provokes) to its out-of-the-box police-corruption scenario.

And so canned drama is what we get; the movie's final moments — the rest of this paragraph qualifies as a further spoiler for those who have somehow failed to predict what happens — become reduced to Dormer, made sagacious by impending death, telling Nightmute rookie Ellie (Hilary Swank) to stay on the straight and narrow, namely by not disposing of evidence that proves Dormer's corruption. Ellie, as conceived, embodies the idea of an obligatory character: the up-and-comer who studied Dormer in school(!) and is shocked — shocked, I tell you! — to learn her idol may be less than perfect.

As well as Swank inhabits Ellie, it's better to scratch off such an ancillary character altogether — Dormer doesn't need a cop on his tail; he's got the sun — and focus on the purity of the near-perfect Dormer/Finch dyad. It's more real and more compelling by an order of magnitude than cop-movie clichés; when the movie inhabits this relationship, which is a lot, it's the (still young) summer's best. Had the conclusion eschewed standard-issue platitudes to give us something messier and more human, Insomnia could have been majestic, as illuminating of our little corruptions as Nightmute's unsetting sun.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)