Insomnia. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Hillary Seitz based on the film directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg and written by Nikolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg. With Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney, Nicky Katt, and Paul Dooley. A Warner Bros. Pictures release. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Holiday, Hoyts, and Showcase cinemas.

In his brief career, director Christopher Nolan has shown a distinct flair for re-creating mental disorders: voyeurism in Following (1998), amnesia in Memento (2001), and now the title malady in Insomnia. As such, his films represent three major components of cinema itself: the waking dream, the impulse to watch, and, in the case of this remake of the fine Scandinavian film of the same name, the film industry's own short-term memory and tendency to redo. Another element, however, redeems Insomnia from being just a skilled rehash: Nolan's knack for the salient detail that, after a shift in perspective or point of view, becomes revelatory.

Not even the performances of Al Pacino and Robin Williams -- miscast, and their characters misconceived -- can undermine Nolan's mastery of mood and image. Pacino plays the aptly named Will Dormer, a legendary LAPD homicide detective who's flying with his partner Hap (Martin Donovan) to "Nightmute" in northernmost Alaska to investigate a murder. The glazed wilderness below is almost as terrifying in its brightness as the stark photos of the nude teenage victim. Equally disturbing are the two cops' sotto voce discussion of an Internal Affairs investigation they're leaving behind.

So Dormer arrives in the Land of the Midnight Sun with no little baggage -- and a lot of it is under his eyes. Regardless, he goes about his business with uncanny, if perfunctory, skill, examining the body and determining from tiny clues the circumstances of the victim's death (illustrated with implicating flashback inserts) and the character of her killer. He sets a trap in a remote cabin; the suspect shows up and flees. Dormer gives chase through a tunnel and into a fog that diffuses the perpetual noon of the Arctic summer into a blinding light. Shots are fired; Hap is killed.

They believe Dormer when he reports that the suspect shot Hap, but the story gets harder to stick to when said suspect, third-rate detective novelist Walter Finch (Williams devoid of shick, and so neutralized), calls Dormer and proposes a deal. The cat-and-mouse game that follows is more mouse than cat, as Pacino, sleepless from stress, guilt, and the sunlight that no amount of masking tape can block out of his hotel room, starts looking really, really tired.

Earlier on, interrogating the victim's boyfriend, he shows some ferocity, and much later he evinces the guilt and sorrow of the lost soul huddled in the shadows of The Godfather. But for the most part he looks as if he'd just crawled out of the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Unlike the original's Stellan Skarsgård, who doesn't shy from feeling up an underage witness, or Orson Welles's corrupt-cop prototype in Touch of Evil, Pacino's Will Dormer is not a flawed man with a tragic virtue but a virtuous man with a tragic flaw. And even the flaw is virtuous. No wonder Pacino nods off.

The movie does not, however, and the reason is that though Nolan's films seek to re-create the subjective experience of his characters, the world he creates for them is utterly determined. Psychological development and moral choice are therefore secondary. His heroes and villains alike are victims, trapped in an inexorable system, so the best they can hope for is, as in classical tragedy, some redeeming knowledge or shock of recognition. And they achieve this by looking back from another point of view, in the manner of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or from the vantage of a ravaged memory seeking recovery, as in Nolan's own Memento. In Insomnia this re-vision is presented partly through the eyes of female onlookers: the hotel clerk (Maura Tierney) who listens to Dormer in the hours between too late and too early; the local cop (Hilary Swank) who adulates Dormer and is put in charge of whitewashing his partner's death. Too bad Nolan defuses most of the sexual friction.

Then there is the passing, unexplained detail that opens the film and recurs throughout. When its truth is finally revealed, it explains everything, or perhaps nothing. Although not as urgent or original as his first two films, Nolan's Insomnia sheds enough light on what is hidden, and why, to trouble one's slumber.

Issue Date: May 24 - 30, 2002