Tossing and turning

Night never falls in Insomnia, a detective thriller from Christopher Nolan, director of Memento. Suspense films typically rely on the cover of darkness, yet Insomnia takes place in the sleepy town of Nightmute, Alaska, at the time of year when the sun never actually sets.

Instead of using shadows to build suspense, Insomnia boldly takes place in the harsh light of day. It may be the latest in a long line of cop-and-killer dramas since Silence of the Lambs won the Oscar, but Insomnia takes such an original approach to the police procedural that it gives the tired genre a jolt.

For physical reasons alone, Al Pacino is well-cast as the lead of a film called Insomnia. With his haggard demeanor and his red-rimmed eyes, Pacino’s Will Dormer looks like he could use 40 winks at the beginning of the film. Dormer, a celebrated Los Angeles detective, travels with younger partner Hap (Martin Donovan, veteran of Hal Hartley films) to help the Alaskan officers investigate the serial-style murder of a teenage girl.

Insomnia initially plays things by the book, with standard autopsy and stakeout scenes. The tensions between Dormer and Hap over an Internal Affairs investigation seems to be the standard type of complication meant to paint the hero as a lone beacon of integrity. Hilary Swank brings some youthful vigor as a Nightmute officer so thrilled to be working with Detective Dormer, she could be his groupie.

But when the officers try to flush out the murderer, a fog bank rolls in that conceals a fatal mishap. Dormer, despite being a “clean” cop, is left trying to cover up a suspicious accident, and is aghast to learn that his quarry has seen the whole thing.

Insomnia’s publicity trumpets Robin Williams’ change-of-pace role as an amoral killer, and the film is scarcely a whodunit. Williams’ Walter Finch, an alienated crime novelist, insinuates himself into Dormer’s life with unsettling intimacy. It’s a fascinating turn from Williams, whose trademark twinkling smile seems pained and lonely, while his soft delivery is so level it’s nearly free of human passions. He may commit monstrous deeds, but Finch seems a more fully dimensioned person than the motor-mouthed man-child Williams usually plays.

The meat of Insomnia consists of Finch and Dormer’s confrontations and interrogations that have tensions within tensions, with each trying to out-maneuver the other. Instead of trying to shout down each other, the actors maintain menacing, conspiratorial tones. As in Donnie Brasco, Pacino mutes his hoo-hah bombast, with the least convincing scene having Dormer loudly bullying a nubile witness at a garbage dump.

Pacino grows strung-out as Nightmute’s midnight sun keeps Dormer from getting any shut-eye. His increasingly drastic efforts to block the perpetual light in his hotel room make a supple metaphor for the pangs of his conscience.

Nolan stylishly shows the symptoms of sleep deprivation, with ambient noise in the police squad room becoming deafening, or a set of windshield wipers taking on a hypnotic rhythm. Nolan mostly maintains a linear narrative, although he makes use of short, almost subliminal flashbacks and returns to the image of white cotton fabric seeping with blood, which makes a visual contrast to the icy Alaskan landscape. The cinematography drinks in spectacular vistas as deftly as it narrows in on tiny details, like bullets kept in evidence bags.

Where Nolan’s Memento was most memorable for its back-to-front story structure, Insomnia is grounded on the strength of its script, adapted by Hillary Seitz from a 1997 Norwegian drama. Police thrillers routinely hint at bonds between cops and criminals, but in Insomnia the policeman finds himself genuinely complicitous with the perpetrator. Nolan and his cast make Insomnia a truly character-driven work of film noir, in a setting of bright light and moral darkness that grants no one the sleep of the just.??