You’re a good man. I know that. Even if you’ve forgotten it.
I don’t know that it’s happened enough times that I can say that Christopher Nolan does this “often,” but he does sometimes, at least, start his films with a shot that kind of speaks to the movie on some deeper level than at first appears, a shot that gets at something about the movie in a way that you don’t know the first time you see it. Think about the first shot of Memento, that Polaroid photograph fading, instead of appearing, as Lenny shakes it; yes, it’s the movie giving you a helpful visual clue about the direction things are going to be moving in this story, but it has a deeper meaning as well: we’re literally watching Lenny shake an image back into obscurity, force a memory into forgetting. It’s essentially what he’ll do at the climax of the film. Or think about The Prestige and that opening shot, panning across a forest floor littered with hats, with “The Prestige” literally super-imposed on top of the image and a voice asks us the central question of the movie, “Are you watching closely?” Nolan doesn’t just show us the prestige of Angiers’ central trick, he bloody well labels it “The Prestige” and yet I still ******* missed it the first time.
The first image we see in Insomnia is more abstract and probably a bit less layered than those two examples, but it’s absolutely a key image expressing a key theme. The shot is so close-up that it’s kind of hard to know exactly what it is you’re seeing, but that first image is of a drop of blood spreading in fabric. Because what this movie is about is corruption. The slow but inexorable spread of corruption.
I suspect this movie will always be seen as somewhat lesser in Nolan’s filmography by a lot of people and, to be fair, it is an outlier in many ways. It’s the only film on his directorial resume that he doesn’t have a writing credit on; I think it’s safe to assume that he took a pass on the screenplay by Hillary Seitz though and, even if he didn’t, it’s clear that the script deals with themes that he likes exploring. The film is also his only straight-up remake, though both Nolan and Seitz have discussed that, while drawn to the original film, they wanted to do something different with the main character and not just do a faithful remake. And, finally, it’s Nolan’s only non-Batman film to primarily be told in a linear chronology. I think it’s easy to make the judgment that this is, for these reasons, a less personal or a less auteur driven film than than Nolan’s other works. I think it was also perhaps seen as something of a disappointment coming after Memento because it’s a much more straight-forward film in a lot of ways, most especially formally. I disagree with all of those issues, but, even if I didn’t, I don’t know exactly how to get past the fact that, even if it is less personal, it’s a fantastic movie, one that I personally rank very high in Nolan’s filmography.
I think it does actually fit really well in a kind of thematic trilogy of Nolan’s first three films. His next film will obviously be Batman Begins and, for better and for worse, that’s when Nolan really becomes a blockbuster filmmaker. In his first three films, he’s really working primarily in relation to the noir genre, both working in it and commenting on it. Following, Memento and this movie are all essentially stories of corruption. They’re also all films about disorientation and they try to stylistically bring the audience into that disorientation by, in Following & Memento, playing with chronology, and, in Insomnia, using light and sound to evoke the disruption caused by sleeplessness. And, finally, in a stylistic similarity that I find interesting, they are all focused on a triangle of characters. Each of these films essentially revolves around three main characters and the shifting allegiances and understandings between them. Batman Begins is going to undeniably usher in the “massive ensemble” era of Nolan’s filmmaking, but these first three movies are quite stripped down in that way.
Anyway, the basic story of the film sees Al Pacino’s Will Dormer, hotshot cop from LA, journeying into the land of the Midnight Sun to solve a brutal murder in Alaska. Once there, his mental and emotional state begins to deteriorate because he can’t sleep due to the constantly shining sun and mistakes compound upon mistakes until he seems poised to lose everything, really. It’s a good thriller set-up, just the murder aspect, and the insomnia angle is a great, unique premise. And, by the way, while the movie does move chronologically, I kind of feel like the whole “Midnight Sun” angle does play into Nolan’s fascination with time; it is, in its own way, as much a “time out of joint” situation as Memento is.
The performances are very good. I have to admit that, by 2002, I had kind of given up on getting another great, subtle performance out of Al Pacino. My feeling was that the guy who’d done such incredibly nuanced work in his early days had essentially been replaced by the Devil’s Advocate and, look, I’m not knocking the big, shouty performances. Some of those are really great too. But I definitely missed the quieter, more minimal Pacino and I have to say he really knocks me out in this movie. It’s a really excellent performance, very layered. Dormer is a complex character when the movie starts and he only gets more so; Pacino is able to make him feel like a real person and to make us feel the weight of his disintegration. The weariness that Pacino carries as the film progresses is bone-deep and unsettling to watch. There’s a scene late in the film where Pacino explodes in an interrogation scene and it’s full-on shouty Pacino, but then as he leaves, the camera stays on him long enough for us to see that it was an act, a diversion to give himself an excuse to leave. That kind of double layering is going on with this character all the time in this movie; he’s constantly on the back-foot and trying to gauge what the people around him know and are going to do and he’s constantly trying to manipulate them without seeming to.
Robin Williams is also really excellent as the villain of the piece. This same year, he did One Hour Photo, which is likewise a dark thriller where he plays a pretty malevolent guy, but in some ways I think his performance here is even better. In One Hour Photo, he’s showy and it’s a great performance, but he really disappears in this movie, giving what might just be his most minimal and naturalistic performance. In One Hour Photo, he’s minimal, but he’s obviously insane; in this movie, he’s playing his character, who is a cold-blooded murderer, basically as just a normal dude and it gets chilling over time. There’s a scene, one of the only scenes where Pacino and Williams are face to face for an extended time, on a ferry late in the film and it’s just a masterclass in acting. The two actors are using different styles, but they mesh together perfectly and it’s as thrilling a scene as any in this film. It’s shot in essentially two long takes, one from farther away and one that’s very close and it’s some of the best acting in any of Nolan’s movies in my opinion.
Hillary Swank’s character is the weakest of the main three characters, but she has a pretty solid arc and Swank is good, as she usually is, making more out of her material than a lesser performer could. Paul Dooley is unfortunately wasted in a small role, but Nicky Katt makes the most out of his supporting role as an abrasive local cop who resents Dormer’s presence, kind of stealing every scene he’s in. Martin Donovan and Maura Tierney are also quite good.
I honestly just really like this movie. Pacino’s performance is a really evocative one and, coupled with some directorial techniques, he’s able to really bring us into Dormer’s exhausted experience. There’s a moment or two that maybe doesn’t work as well as it should. There’s a scene involving Dormer basically terrorizing one of the dead girl’s friends in order to get information and it feels dropped in from another movie. On the other hand, there’s a moment late in the film when Robin Williams’ character does something that is just so mind-numbingly stupid that it has always pulled me out of the movie on previous viewings. But on the commentary track, Nolan talks about the justification Williams came up with for that moment and it really makes sense to me, so I’m glad to have that resolved in my head. Regardless, Insomnia is kind of the last film Nolan will make in this morally complex, but small scale, thriller mode and it’s a good one to end this first trilogy with. It’s a movie I may just always like better than most people, but I really do love it at the end of the day. 4 stars.
tl;dr – somewhat underrated in Nolan’s career, this excellent morally-complex thriller digs deep into themes of corruption and boasts two outstanding lead performances. 4 stars.