God, have I been there. I lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling, wondering why I can’t sleep. It can be one or two o’clock in the morning; I might have been up for 16 or 20 hours, but I’m totally alert, my eyes wide open. Should I have had that Diet Dr. Pepper around 9:00? Is there an issue at work that’s clawing at the back of my mind? Sometimes, it’s a total mystery.

Director Christopher Nolan took memory loss, a condition common to most humans, and took it to the Nth degree in “Memento”, which turned out to be the best movie of 2001 (NOT “A Beautiful Mind”). Nolan has done it again, now with sleeplessness, in “Insomnia”, a devilishly hypnotic picture that, while not as creative or daring as “Memento”, still stands head and shoulders above most modern crime thrillers.

Will Dormer (Al Pacino), a Robbery-Homicide detective from Los Angeles, already seems hung over and tired from the moment he arrives in the small town of Nightmute, Alaska. He’s there with Hap (Martin Donovan), his partner, and their relationship is strained at the moment because Hap is planning to cooperate with an Internal Affairs investigation into some of Will’s rather creative methods of gathering evidence. They’re in Nightmute to advise the local cops on a murder case, and Will is probably happy to get away from the frying pan for a while.

One problem for Will, right off the bat, is that up here, they’re in the middle of a cycle in which the sun comes up and doesn’t come down for months; you wake up to a shining sun, and you fall asleep with the same brightness in the sky. Will haplessly struggles throughout the film to establish some sort of equilibrium with the area, all in vain. He stays awake the first night, then the next, then the next. He begins to look more and more disheveled and bewildered with each passing day. He’s also on edge about the investigation back in L.A., and haunted by his extra-legal police work that motivated it.

In time, they close in on a suspect in the woods, where the fog makes it practically impossible to see beyond a few yards. Will thinks he sees the armed killer and fires his weapon. It turns out that he’s just shot Hap instead. Will makes a bad situation worse by covering it up and saying that the suspect killed Hap. Even worse, the guy they were after escapes. Worst of all, the guy saw Will shoot his partner, and knows Will has something to hide.

Here’s where it gets a little convoluted: the killer, a nerdish writer named Walter Finch (Robin Williams, a comic who should stick to dramas because he’s damn good in most of them)), starts a strange relationship with Will. They have a couple of private meetings where he lays it out. They both recently killed people, and don’t want to go to jail. Incidentally, Finch says his was an accident, too; he got angry at this teenage girl he was seeing, he hit her, and it just got out of hand. Finch has a tape recording of him and Will talking about how to set up a local boy for the murder, so now Will seems stuck.

This sort of plot development, in the hands of any number of cookie-cutter filmmakers, would be the type of stuff that makes you roll your eyes, groan, chuckle, demand your money back, etc. Nolan, however, makes it work by setting up an ominous environment (the beautiful but desolate Alaskan mountains) and having the actors restrain themselves considerably. The dialogue, particularly during the first secret exchange between Will and Finch, is sort of a verbal ballet. Both characters have a point to make, but are a little wary of actually coming out and saying too much at the wrong moment. Pacino and Williams handle these scenes expertly, without their usual theatrical tricks. Nolan, for his part, inserts a lot of quiet moments and a few visual feats that make you feel Will’s own sense of disorientation and mounting anxiety.

The film ends predictably, with a shootout and a fistfight. It’s done well but you could see it coming a mile away. It’s the movie’s only big weakness, but Pacino redeems it at the very end, just as his character takes steps to redeem himself. Will finally manages to get some shut-eye, and you get the sense that his previous battle with insomnia may have not had that much to do with whether the sun was up or not.



Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age