INSOMNIA Reviewed 7/25/2002

Detective stories were born as whodunits: readers matching wits with a wily sleuth. But modern forensics has rendered the whodunit obsolete. One fingernail, one hair, and a mere tyro can convict the smartest villain. So whodunits have given way to techno-police procedurals, Nero Wolfe supplanted by CSI, where the puzzle is not who did it? but what infinitesimal mistake did he make?

Forensics has similarly changed the nature of legal defense, from action to motivation. I drowned my children? I must have been temporarily crazy, and not even your mountain of DNA can convict me.

INSOMNIA, the American remake of and improvement on the recent Swedish film starring Stellen Skarsgaard, opens with extreme close-ups of the aftermath of murder. Blood drops onto woolen fibers. Hair is carefully washed. Nails are clipped by hands that wear strip-off antiseptic gloves. The perp is repairing the crime scene.

Enter, with suitable Lone Ranger overtones, detective Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and his partner Hap (Martin Donovan), flying over glaciers to the Land of the Midnight Sun, Nightmute, Alaska. Dormer hunts not clues but guilt, honing in on each witness and, with a few cruelly clairvoyant insights, reducing each in turn to blobs of quivering id. Identify, expose, flay, discard: like a Freudian Terminator, Dormer slashes open the psyche of everyone he meets, sparing only eager young detective Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), pretty and smart and idealistic and adoring … until he is trumped by his antagonist, his alter ego, crime novelist Walter Finch (Robin Williams), whom he encounters via a sleepless-night phone call. I did it, Finch announces matter-of-factly as one might present a business card. "We're partners now."

Now, finally, the film really begins. Knowing that Finch did it, but for clumsy cliché plot reasons unable to act on this knowledge, Dormer engages Finch in a fascinating game of psychological chess:

• Dormer wants Finch to incriminate himself. "You think you're special?" he tells Walter. "You're my job. I know how you guys think. I can smell you."
• Finch wants Dormer to shrive him. "I didn't mean to kill her," he whines, then adds, purring, "You know how it is. You killed somebody and you didn't mean to, right?"

INSOMNIA owes much to ANATOMY OF A MURDER, Otto Preminger's 1959 courtroom drama. We know Lieutenant Manion (Ben Gazzara) shot Barney Quill: murder or temporary insanity? We know Finch killed Kay Connell; did he mean to?

Where Dormer is a moral absolutist -- right and wrong, black and white -- Finch is the honeyed voice of moral relativism. In our hearts all souls are gray, and through the fog of gray ambiguity he croons to Dormer, accept that you and I are alike, and you can take comfort that I understand you. It is the same seductive warped mirror that Belloc holds before Indiana Jones in RAIDERS: "We are not so unalike, you and I. It would take only the smallest nudge" -- Belloc savors the word -- "to push you out of the light."

In Nightmute, light itself plays false. Day and night are indistinguishable. The body's clocks are interrupted. Dormer cannot sleep, his insomnia eroding not just his detecting skills but also his moral compass. Director Christopher Nolan (MEMENTO) loves unreliable narrators, here using jerky handheld shots, intercut incomplete-flashback imagery, and rising and falling sound effects to show us Dormer's failing reason. Why did I do it? Dormer wonders obsessively, just as Finch wishes him to. What did I intend?

Although Swank and Donovan deliver perfectly presentable performance, INSOMNIA depends on its two leads, Williams and especially Pacino. Successful comedians seek respectability as dramatic actors by channeling their humor into attitude (Kevin Pollak in THE USUAL SUSPECTS) or playing against their madcap younger selves (Steve Martin in THE SPANISH PRISONER) to generate an aura of foreboding. Of an ordinary actor we would suspect nothing, but this is Robin Williams, Mork from Ork, and because the audience knows the actor can bust out in a microsecond, we are seat-edge wondering if his character will.

Pacino has played crooks or cops his whole career. In INSOMNIA, he relies for character definition mainly on his gaunt disheveled visage and peremptory growl, substituting them for genuine acting as a toothless German shepherd still barks at every sound. He fuses the these-eyes-have-seen-too-much detective he played in SEA OF LOVE with the brusque martinet of SCENT OF A WOMAN. The performance is mannered, even baroque, just this side of annoying.

INSOMNIA is better made than its acting, the direction and cinematography creating a world that is both beautifully real and cleverly metaphoric, light and sleep standing both for themselves and as symbols for a half-dozen concepts. Few movies both absorb during their action and provoke reflection afterwards. INSOMNIA does. Few American remakes outstrip their foreign inspirations. INSOMNIA does.

ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith