Insomnia

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney, Martin Donovan

Rated Rated R for language, some violence and brief nudity

Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia highlights two trends becoming apparent in mainstream Hollywood film. The first is a movement towards realizing that contemporary European art cinema has a lot to offer the American film industry. The second is laziness. Insomnia is a remake of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s excellent film of the same name, and with a few fairly minor adjustments and budget-induced freedoms, the movie’s story is more or less the same. So what do we have here? An outstanding 1997 foreign film remade by one of Hollywood’s young and upcoming directors. Replace Insomnia for Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos and Nolan for Cameron Crowe and that description works perfectly for Vanilla Sky as well. And like Crowe, Nolan succeeds in taking a good film, bumping the budget way above European standards and emerging with a movie almost as good as the one he started with. The question, however, is why wouldn’t a talented director like Nolan prefer to work with unoriginal material? The answer, I suggest, is that he’s playing it safe.

The first thing that jumps out at you in watching the film is that someone certainly opened the purse strings for this picture. Nolan’s first full length, Memento, wasn’t a particularly cheap film to produce, but by starting Insomnia with a sustained shot taken from above an airplane soaring over Alaskan mountains, Nolan let’s us know that he’s in the big leagues now. Another, somewhat unfortunate, indication of this promotion, however, can be seen in the generally conservative approach that Nolan takes to the majority of the film.

Please kiss. Please. Just once. Do it for Ben. Please? Pretty pretty please?

In Memento, Nolan was willing to take chances and whatever success the film achieved should probably be attributed to the director’s innovative risk-taking. With Insomnia, however, Nolan let’s his story do the work for him. The narrative flows linearly with Nolan preferring to focus on creating mood and tension through tight framing and the consistent production of dreary-yet-beautiful compositions. These techniques are employed successfully and within the bounds of traditional Hollywood film production. It’s a stylish thriller, not particularly provoking in either its form or content.

The film’s story is a bit watered down from that of the original, but all the major plot points are hit. There’s a murder, Pacino’s Will Dormer goes to investigate, does something bad and can’t sleep for the rest of the film/investigation. The film is devoid of much of sexual tension and ambiguity of the original, and I believe this can best be attributed to Nolan (or someone) wanting to make certain this film made some money. Another

"Matt, stop whining about me."

questionable decision was casting Robin Williams as a sociopath. Williams, of course, excels at comedy and is reasonable if not irksome with dramatic comedy and shouldn’t go anywhere near sociopathy. The decision to cast him probably sold some tickets, but artistically it is indefensible. Yes, a sort of unassuming actor is necessary to play a good sociopath, but putting Popeye out there is a bit much. Anyway, past filmography aside, this just isn’t the sort of thing he’s good at. I say a prayer for Jim Carrey every night. Oh, and Pacino’s okay and I’m not a big Hillary Swank fan, but she did all right. Nothing special.

So Nolan takes proven material, spices it up with some cash and comes out with a good, very watchable thriller. Occasionally, such as in the underwater sequence featured in one of the film’s trailers, the extra money combines with artistic ability to create something truly memorable. In other cases, such as the casting of Williams, the film gets Hollywoodized, something I had hoped Nolan would make a career out of avoiding. It’s a pretty good movie, and I suggest you see it (along with the original, of course). But I can’t help but be disappointed when a director such as Nolan chooses to rehash successful European material as opposed to taking it as inspiration and creating his own work. Crowe did the same thing with Vanilla Sky, and I won’t be a bit surprised if this formula proves to be a moneymaker and we see a lot more of it in the future. I suppose it’s nice that these stories will reach larger audiences, but I can’t help but think that if there’s already a perfectly good version of film, then let it be and make something original.

RATING: 68%