Halfway though Insomnia, I was wondering: Could Detective Will Dormer (played by Al Pacino) sleep better during the Alaskan midnight sun if he hadn’t been plagued by guilt, or could the darkness of nightfall have provided adequate passage to sleep, even with his guilt? It’s hard to say. This upside down kind of question is not only the sort of thing that Christopher Nolan likes to toil with in fiction, in the real-life lead up to being hired to direct Insomnia also lay an upside down question.
Could an indie director who shot two tiny films (small films with big ambitions) with a $6k and $9 million budget, respectively, helm a $40 million studio movie with three Oscar winners? The movie that even Nolan says is his most underrated becomes a fascinating moment in the director’s career.
The story goes that Nolan became interested in the Norwegian movie Insomnia in 1997, before he made Memento. When word around town got out that WB was developing an American remake, Nolan tried to get a meeting. But he had only made Following and no one in Hollywood knew who he was. He pushed onward to Memento, (while Jonathon Demme of The Silence of the Lambs eyed Insomnia) and the film languished in development for a few years. That is until Memento came out and caught the eye of Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh, himself, was in the midst of a legendary run that would lead to him being nominated for two director spots at the 2001 Oscars. An accomplishment no director since 1974 managed to achieve, and one of which only four directors in the 100 year history of the Oscars have the distinction. Why does any of this matter? Soderbergh went to bat for Nolan, on the strength of Memento, and even took a producer role (along with George Clooney) to lend the project more legitimacy. Ultimately, Nolan's first mid-budget studio movie was a critcal and financial success, one that led to the Batman trilogy, etc, etc, et al, et al.
Insomnia tells the story of an LA cop embroiled in an Internal Affairs investigation. Sent to Alaska to help a former colleague out with a local murder case, and in no small part to get out from under the weight of the magnifying glass on his professional career, Will Dormer and his partner, Hap Eckhart (the wonderful Martin Donovan) investigate the murder of teenage girl, Kay Connell, in the small town of Nightmute, where the sun doesn’t set this time of year.
The story has all the beats we’ve grown used to: an abusive boyfriend who is sleeping with Kay’s best friend, a small town police force who doesn't have much experience with these types of cases, an earnest young cop who idolizes Pacino’s Dormer, a suspect who writes crime novels (incredible casting here with Robin Williams playing Walter Finch). But there is one outlier, we find out who did it right away. The tension isn’t derived from stones yet unturned but rather it’s a lively cat and mouse game between two men (played by very gifted actors), both victims of circumstance and capable of violence, and both of whom are lying to themselves about their intentions.
There is actually lot of Memento in Insomnia. The cross-cutting editing style, that will eventually be another flourish of Nolan’s, is used in ways to jar you, dazzle you and make you think. Sometimes all at the same time. The opening shot: fibers of white fabric becoming soaked through with blood, is another use of an image shown early on that will echo throughout the whole film until we understand what it means. In fact, the editing style, the quick cuts where you don’t know what you are looking at, until you do, are very successful here to place you inside the inner state of a detective who can’t sleep. The editing might work here even better than in other Nolan films because a detective is always trying to piece together what has happened by looking at and listening to evidence and synthesizing it with all of their senses. (I also think this technique works well in Memento, as these sort of wispy pieces of memories of Lenny’s and in Oppenheimer when we see what it looks like to be inside a theoretical physicist’s mind.)
This version of Insomnia ends with both more and less hope than the original, another paradox Nolan presents for us to consider. And on he will then go into meetings about his vision for Batman, with Memento as his creative calling card and Insomnia as proof he can navigate Hollywood's studio system.
Three out of four alarm clocks shoved into a drawer.
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