Insomnia

Without its A-list cast, Nolan’s cautious entry into Hollywood would have been just another unnecessary American remake of a high-quality European genre film, also slowly told but much rawer and more atmospheric. In the context of Nolan’s filmography, Insomnia is surprising especially because of its relatively conventional structure (the boldest aspects are the confusing flashbacks, which, with respect to what we know, we attribute to someone other than the one to whom they actually belong) and its brightness, which of course has a thematic rationale (furthermore, the lighting changes as Dormer becomes increasingly disoriented due to sleep deprivation). Otherwise, this is, after Following and Memento, the third story of a man traumatised by what happened to him in the past and who is prevented by time from getting a firmer grasp of the situation. Time is Will Dormer’s enemy in the sense that it does not allow him to sleep during the given season in Alaska. Besides investigating a murder and trying to cover up the fact that he himself has committed a crime, he begins to lose his nerve and to make mistakes due to his deepening fatigue. Of course, due to the fact that Al Pacino looks rather worn out from the opening minutes, his transformation consists mainly of chewing more and more intensely and the circles under his eyes getting bigger. Not even Robin Williams gets much room to show off his acting talent, as he maintains a poker face most of the time (which obviously had the purpose of making him seem more sinister, but it doesn’t really work). Nolan simply doesn’t care as much about the characters and their plausibility as he does about the comprehensibility of the narrative for the viewer, which is more jarring in a film largely based on actors than in films whose main draw is unique composition. For example, the behaviour of the hotel receptionist, who forms an attachment to Will, who thus has someone to whom he can confide about one of his past sins (thus fulfilling the receptionist’s sole narrative purpose), makes very little sense. More disturbing are the other “traditional” deficiencies of Nolan’s films – dividing scenes into an unnecessarily large number of shots (as if the filmmaker was afraid that we would lose interest if a shot lasts a little longer), excess dialogue explaining in detail what could have been simply hinted at, faulty spatial relationships between individual shots (an actor is suddenly somewhere other than where he should be based on the previous shot, which is partly due to the overuse of editing). Compared to his more spectacular later films, Nolan doesn’t make much use of locations to shape the mood, which is really a shame given the genre and the setting. However, Insomnia cannot be denied its consistent work with props (the murder weapon, the bullet, the alarm clock) and precisely timed turning points (at first, the twists come every twenty minutes and then every ten by the end), thanks to which the film is relatively briskly paced despite its somnolence. In any case, this is the only Nolan film that I’m not tempted to watch again (for the third time). 70% (31.07.2017) (minder) (meer)