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 In his early days, Al Pacino was gritty and occasionally flamboyant at playing men forced to reason their way through excruciating moral dilemmas. Now, in his well-seasoned middle age, he is a flawless portraitist of similar men whose strength has long burned away, leaving only the naked remnants of their humanity to face these decisive moments. The highlights of his recent career make up a list of men who have reached this breaking point: the superseded football coach in “Any Given Sunday”, the harried producer in “The Insider”, and the relentless cop in “Heat”. And of course he was Michael in “The Godfather” trilogy, pushed further and further into the world he had tried to avoid. Actually, the role he was probably born to play was “Rocky”, because he specializes in the moments when his character, beaten and bloody, crawls about on the canvas in a daze, searching the deepest recesses of his soul for the nerve to rise and beat the ten count. In such roles the proud sag of his face is suspenseful in itself. As he struggles under the weight of his moral crucibles, his sunken cheeks become all rivets and grooves, his weary eyes seem to recede infinitely into pools of bottomless darkness. The face of the older Pacino is like an old burned-out gothic cathedral hit by a slow and devastating earthquake. We hang on to see whether or not this once implacable façade can stave off final collapse.
“Insomnia” is one of the better of these roles, but it also adds a note of provocative ambiguity. Playing Detective Will Dormer, Pacino gives us the fatigued man at the end of his days in the sharpest focus Christopher Nolan’s dreamy camera will allow. The ironic pun of his name (Dormer is close to the French dormir, to sleep) is interesting because Dormer, who is awake for an entire week, is really asleep as a moral being. He was sleepwalking long before he arrived in Nightmute, but we sense right away that he’ll get his wake-up call soon. He tells Ellie that the bigger solutions come from the observation of the smaller details, but the way he offers this and other credos to her, as if they are sayings whose validity he may or may not believe in, makes them sound congealed, no longer capable of providing the answers they had ten or fifteen years earlier. Robin Williams’ Finch, who provides the film’s frost not in his role as the killer but as Dormer’s most accurate moral interpreter, cuts through his now-clichéd police mantras. Tweaking the old axiom, he tells Dormer that he can’t see the wood for the trees. This is true: Dormer is as blind to details as a sleepwalker. He is obsessed with what seem to be the first principles of being a cop: helping the good and punishing the evil. But a policeman’s job is to serve the law without dealing directly with its abstract underpinnings. In a nutshell, this is the ambiguous character of a cop’s everyday work, and “Insomnia” is a wonderful exploration of the hows and whys— and the problematic interrelation of the two—of every cop’s urgent necessity to justify his actions.
But Dormer is not a corrupt cop administering personal justice. Importantly, he is a good cop, and that raises all the questions requisite for a more sophisticated drama. In presenting us with a good man who commits a crime in the name of the law, it captures a sense of the slipperiness of justice that marked “L.A. Confidential” as a great film (or “Serpico”, for that matter). Dormer, haunted by his role in his partner’s death— and even more so, as it turns out, by the Dobbs case and what that represents to him— is almost Shakespearean in complexity. He is like a Brutus in that in seeking to uphold what he believes is good, he simultaneously cuts himself off from the thing he sought to safeguard. He is also like a Macbeth in that he must try and navigate his way in a world that will eventually impose on him the order he successfully, but only temporarily, subverted. Like Macbeth (and Richard III, who Pacino has also played), he is tormented by ghosts. True also to the tragic model, Dormer has a foil, Finch, who both reflects what Dormer is and underscores what he is not. Like Dormer, Finch isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried as he seems at first. Williams, remarkably, fails to destroy the tone of this film as he has in so many others, dropping Iago-like ministrations into Dormer’s ears and then getting out of the way to watch the results. He and Pacino complement each other well.
Unfortunately, Williams may not have gone far enough this time. He is supposed to be much saner than the average deranged killer we’re accustomed to, as the film clearly wants to operate solely in twilight areas devoid of easy characterizations. What if he had killed Kay accidentally? What if he is a good man caught up in bad circumstances, just as Dormer is? Williams’ performance is solid but unexceptional in making these questions believable. Yet the role will be called one of his best simply because every time he’s on screen we cringe, waiting to see if he’ll blow his top and let loose the three-ring circus we know is hiding in there, and he never does. Trouble is, he succeeds too completely. There is never really a hint that Finch, as Dormer memorably puts it, “crossed the line and didn’t even blink”. He is the very picture of wounded fragility that strikes out viciously, but there is no off-kilter portion of his personality that couldn’t be cured with a cheap hooker and a bottle of Prozac. Of course, Finch is a writer, and that’s always a good profession for weirdos that need day jobs in movies like this. He probably keeps a long, gleaming ice pick under his bed, like Sharon Stone, the psychopathic novelist in “Basic Instinct”; the film would have been more agreeably nasty if Finch had kept Sharon Stone underneath his bed.
Nightmute is always sunny at the time of year Dormer and Hap visit, allowing for a good joke at Dormer’s expense. “It’s ten o’clock…at night”, Ellie almost regretfully informs him when he wants to go to the high school and question Randy. It also allows Nolan the easy but effective visual punch— no matter how many desks and lamps Dormer piles up in front of his window, he cannot escape the sleep-killing light of truth. The more he wants to hide, the harder it shines. Predictably, only when Dormer finds his way again as police officer does he finally earn the right to sleep again. When he does, Nolan handles the scene with langorous restraint, allowing just the right level of tragedy into the story. Principally this means allowing Pacino the space and time for his noble end while denying Hillary Swank the obligatory “goodnight, sweet prince” response. Apparently, when you’re up against Pacino, one Oscar is not enough to earn you some airtime.
It is this directorial command that impresses most about “Insomnia”. Like Sean Penn, Nolan is highly adept at small but fierce dramas, carefully building around well-drawn characters and locations. Here, as in his debut, the excellent “Memento”, he revels in dreamlike psychic ripples which throw his characters out of whack. From the opening shots, the mixture of the strands of the blood-soaked cloth with the ridges on the icy plains creates a disorienting confusion between the very great and the very small, a rich texturing of Dormer’s internal crisis that continues throughout the movie. In visualizing Dormer’s insomnia, Nolan made a clever artistic choice. As Dormer’s insomnia lessens his grip on reality, his world paradoxically attains greater solidity, a play on the “awareness” that Finch talks of. Things haunt Dormer as much as ghosts. Table fans, coffee makers, and windshield wipers all reveal an inner life at one time or another, as if lack of sleep has pulled away the veil to expose a grotesque chaos at the heart of Dormer’s world. That said, Nolan too often pulls back from the wild and ungainly in Dormer’s altered state. If Pacino’s characters find themselves stretched to the limit as moral beings, Nolan seems more interested in the gradual dissolution of minds that are pushed to the precarious margins of reality. Yet he seems to have been too polite to ask his star to writhe on the pin the way Guy Pearce did in “Memento”. He allows the film to drift between these two poles without nearly enough kinetic energy, not quite bold enough to stir the film’s greatness from its quiet slumber. |
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