Alaska here I come

The Italian neo-realists were on to something. They believed that the only way to accurately portray reality was to use non-professional actors. It is not really feasible to use non-professional actors, but it is definitely doable to use non-star actors. Case in point, Robin Williams in Insomnia. The studio gets Williams and draws in a bigger audience, and Williams gets to play a psychopath which allows people to say “he acts in a wide range of roles”, and all in all, everyone wins. Everyone that is, except for the film.

Williams is not at all bad in the role (Walter Finch, a mystery writer. It’s just that you never think “that man is psycho,” you think “Robin Williams is playing a psycho guy.” The problem with this is that once the viewer is aware of Robin Williams playing the character, the realism of the film is gone and the viewer becomes acutely and constantly conscious that they are watching a movie. This distancing from reality through the star system happens with every well-known actor to some extent. Al Pacino is playing a cop. We know that. Somehow, Pacino seems to blend into the part and we can see him as a detective. Perhaps it is because it is a similar role to one he has played many times. Perhaps it is because he is just a great actor. It is also interesting that the studio has pushed Williams as the killer. Even though he does not appear until quite late in the film, every preview for the film made it pretty evident that Williams was not on the right side of the murdering line.

The movie itself is quite good. The plot revolves around two troubled Los Angeles detectives who head to Alaska to solve a murder and get away from the heat of the investigation. The two detectives, Will Dormer and Hap Eckhart (Martin Donavan) are trying to solve the case of a girl who is found beaten to death but completely cleaned up after. Nails cut and scrubbed, hair washed, and so on. Dormer is the senior detective and carries with him a history of solving famous cases. He is a legend in the police world and in particular to Ellie Burr (Hillary Swank), a pretty and overly earnest town policewoman. The detectives bait the murderer with a false clue and trap him at a cabin.

(SPOILER) In the fog, Dormer mistakenly kills his partner and tries to cover it up. Unfortunately, the murderer has seen it and tried blackmail Dormer into pinning the murder on someone else. The film then becomes about Dormer trying to solve the case while not letting anyone know of his own guilt. This applies in particular to Ellie Burr who is assigned to write up the report on Hap’s death. (SPOILER OVER) To make matters worse, Dormer can’t sleep. Partly out of guilt, and partly because of the midnight sun which never sets. Hence the title: Insomnia.

Pacino is very good at playing the sleep-deprived, talented, and irritable cop. There are some other minor problems with the film. Swank’s character is spectacularly underdeveloped. She is a caricature, used not as a real person, but as a plot device to further the plot, when she should be a crucial character to the development of the story. The ending is a major disappointment as it lets go of the methodical mental drama it was building to go for a nonsensical action sequence. Also, the film, at one hour and 58 minutes, seems to drag on a little long for the subject matter.

"Insomnia" is remake of a 1997 Norwegian film by Erik Skjoldbjærg that caught director Nolan’s attention even before the huge success of Memento. Having not seen the original, I can only say that it seems a little odd to remake a film only five years after it was first released. However, the result is still solid. Nolan is making himself a director to pay close attention to. The script is clever and flows nicely. Because there is not a whole lot of action, the film relies heavily on its actors and its script and both perform, for the most part, quite admirably. Insomnia is a good film; it just feels like it should have been great.