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INSOMNIA
6/10
USA
2002 : Christopher Nolan : 118 mins
Veteran
LA cop Will Dormer (Al Pacino) arrives in an Alaskan town to investigate
a teenage girl’s the murder. Chasing a suspect in fog, he shoots his partner
Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) – apparently by accident, perhaps partly
on purpose. Dormer also has trouble adapting to the perpetual daylight
of the far-north latitudes and can’t sleep. Though the local cops - including
eager rookie Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank) - suspect the victim’s boyfriend
(Jonathan Jackson), Dormer’s investigations lead to nice-guy local novelist
Walter Finch (Robin Williams). But Finch has knowledge of Dormer’s own
dubious activities, and before long the two are soon entangled in a messy,
symbiotic web of guilt and accusation…
After
Memento, expectations
were sky high for Nolan’s followup. Sensibly, he’s avoided the temptation
to serve up more of the gimmicky same – but with Insomnia he’s
gone too far in the other direction, constructing a solid, engrossing
but ultimately over-familiar, over-conventional movie. Insomnia isn’t
even original: Hillary Seitz’s script adapts Erik Skjoldbaerg’s1997 Norwegian
thriller, co-written by Nikolaj Frobenius. It’s as if that, handed a big
budget and some very big-name stars -Oscar winners Pacino, Williams and
Swank – Nolan was determined to prove he could be a safe pair of hands
when required. But Oscars are heavy items, capable of weighing down any
project with their aura of prestige and seriousness.
This
is essentially pretty well-trodden ground – and not just in the Twin
Peaks-meets-Limbo aspects of the basic set-up. Dormer and Finch’s
relationship is no more or less intriguing than that between Clint Eastwood
and John Malkovich from In The Line Of Fire, or even Kurt Russell
and Richard Jordan from the cheesily enjoyable The Mean Season.
But Insomnia has pretensions to higher levels – it’s a long, somewhat
ponderous affair, but with no accompanying investigation of ideas and
nothing much new being said. And while Pacino is always a delight, isn’t
he sick of playing tormented-genius cops? Heat
should have been the last word on the subject.
Nolan’s
movie is much shorter than Mann’s masterpiece, but feels longer: the second
half drags, right up to the overextended, overwrought finale. And the
director seems so concerned with giving Pacino (and to a lesser extent
Williams) Oscar-bait prominence he ends up selling short the supporting
cast – Swank’s ‘Nancy Drew’ part is thankless, but at least she has more
to do that the terrific Nicky Katt, stuck in a cliched ‘resentful local
cop’ role. The film’s situations recall, but have none of the unpredictably
edgy intensity of, Bloody
Angels (1732 Hotten), another late-90s Scandinavian cop-out-of-water
thriller. That movie managed to dramatise and address the political implications
of its material, while maintaining both a psychological coherence and
a sense of humour. Seitz’s idea of irony, by contrast, is to call her
sleepless leading man ‘Dormer’.
In
terms of a script choice, Insomnia may represent a disappointing
step backwards for Nolan, but there’s no suggestion that Memento was
any kind of directorial fluke. Aided by Dody Dorn’s editing and some startling
widescreen cinematography from Wally Pfister, Nolan confirms he’s perhaps
the most accomplished of the younger ‘British’ directors (he’s half-American).
In one bravura (newly invented) sequence a breathless chase across logs
floating downriver suddenly becomes a desperate underwater battle for
survival. And towards the end, as Dormer’s senses are increasingly distorted
by the effects of insomnia, Nolan manipulates the light levels so we feel
the exact contours of our hero’s mental state – just like in Memento.
And Insomnia also retains that movie’s subtle feeling for place,
as when we accompany Dormer on a furtive ‘middle of the night’ errand
down some eerily bright 3am backstreets.
But
these are isolated highlights, and the overall movie doesn’t stack up
as satisfyingly as it should do – it’s hard to shake the feeling that
Nolan is constantly having to rein in and muting his abilities, as when
Soderbergh got the Erin Brockovich
gig. These aren’t bad movies by any means, and the box-office has
responded warmly to both - but you do wonder if the directors’ consciences
didn’t provoke a sleepless night or two of their own.
21st
June 2002
(seen 15th June 2002, UCI Silverlink, North Shields)
by Neil
Young
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