Those who lost sleep puzzling over Christopher Nolan’s last film might want to stock up on tranquillizers. Like last year’s brain-scrambling Memento, Insomnia finds the director playing knowingly with the conventions of film noir. But where Memento was a deliberate and brilliantly structured nod to the plot complications and red herrings of classic detective fiction, Insomnia gives us what can best be described as daylight noir. Deft, clever, stylish and atmospheric, it isn’t just another summer thriller; it’s the work of a director who combines the raw talent of his generation with the old-world craftsmanship of film noir masters like John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock.
The film stars Al Pacino as Will Dormer, an L.A. detective who is sent with his partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) to a remote Alaskan town to solve the beating death of a 17-year-old girl. The locals are skeptical, except for young and eager Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), a new officer who has studied Dormer’s most famous case. Unfortunately, Dormer’s impressive track record has also brought him under the scrutiny of Internal Affairs, which threatens to derail his career and set a lot of scumbags free.
Dormer’s situation worsens when he accidentally shoots Hap while chasing the killer on a foggy shoreline. He finds himself trying to blame Hap’s death on the killer by covering up ballistic evidence, which leaves him haunted by visions of Hap, and unable to sleep (a problem exacerbated by the town of Night Mute’s northern latitude, which means five straight months of daylight). Not surprisingly, the plot thickens. The killer, who knows what happened, tries to blackmail Dormer into framing someone else for the girl’s murder. Meanwhile, Ellie is investigating Hap’s death, and things aren’t adding up.
Working from Hillary Seitz’s distinctly Hitchcockian screenplay (itself based on a 1997 Norwegian film of the same name), Nolan infuses nearly every shot with atmosphere to spare. Cryptic images are repeated often—blood soaking into cloth fibres, a man in surgical gloves rubbing something—but we’re not sure what we’re watching until Nolan tips his hand toward the end. Nolan also shows us just enough of the girl’s murder to let our imagination fill in the gruesome details, creating that unsettling Psycho effect of making us think we’ve seen more than we have. But his best stylistic trick is making daylight seem darker than night. (The sequence on the fog-enshrouded shore is only one example. Even the brightest outdoor scenes have a stark washed-out grayness.)
Also notable is the work of Pacino. Remarkably restrained for a man known for exploding into full-voice histrionics at the slightest provocation, he paints Dormer with all the right shades of flawed heroism and seen-too-much experience. Pacino looks old here, like a man who has spent far too much time being hard-boiled and doing what is necessary to get the job done (and in what I hope is the result of makeup rather than Method acting, he gets craggier and baggier-eyed with every sleepless night). As the killer, Robin Williams is effectively creepy; there’s something wrong about his nebbishy, soft-spoken exterior right from the first time we see him. (In another clever touch, he’s a writer of pulp detective fiction.) But it’s the dialogue scenes between the two men that make the film most closely resemble film noir predecessors like Strangers on a Train, and that make Christopher Nolan most closely resemble the successor to the long-vacant title of Master of Suspense.
(3.5/4)