"Insomnia" Rated R
****.5/*****
Throughout the entire running time of Christopher Nolan’s lastest film, Insomnia, Al Pacino’s Det. Will Dormer looks tired. His fatigue after six days of no sleep in an Alaskan town where (during this time of the year) the sun almost never sets, gets in the way of his job of finding the murderer of a local teenager. Through Pacino’s acting and Nolan’s brilliant direction, we come to fear not that night and not the shadows, but instead the ever present glare of the sun that keeps Dormer from thinking straight.
While Det. Dormer and his less than amiable partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) are on loan from the L.A.P.D. to help Det. Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank) solve the murder, Eckhart informs Dormer of a pending Internal Affairs investigation on their section of the L.A.P.D. and his idea to make a deal with the I.A. which could lead to Dormer losing his job.
While on a stakeout to find the killer, they detectives are sent on a chase through the dense fog and woods. This is a truly brilliant scene. As Dormer’s mind races, as he attempts to find the killer through fog so thick he can barley see 10 feet ahead of him, he shots. The shot rings out and echoes loudly across the rocks and trees as the body falls. But when Dormer goes to investigate, its not the killer but his partner.
Shortly after this, Dormer, harassed by a voice on the phone who calls in the middle of his long, sleepless nights, agrees to meet the man who claims to have killed the girl. On a ferry we see Walter Finch (Robin Williams) determined and pensive, read to make a deal. Dormer knows that Walter Finch is a killer, and Finch was the only one who saw who shot his partner in the fog.
It is trilling alone to see three Academy Awarding actors play off of one another to creating chilling scenes, but director Christopher Nolan goes beyond that. He is not intimidated by his star power. He knows that the characters are important not the actors. Also, we know from Nolan’s previous, ingenious effort Memento, that he knows how to handle a suspense story. Nolan’s knows precisely what his characters are thinking, what they fear and why, and using this is able to apply stress to the right sequences to make the audience stunned and riveted for two hours.
By the end of the film, Dormer hasn’t slept in six days. As he slowly becomes more and more maddened and disillusioned, Nolan does too. The camera slowly becomes less steady and more blurred and disoriented.
