You know, I had a pretty rough day today myself.

Rating: 6/10 (5 April 2003)

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** This is a tiny bit of a digression, but I watched this movie when I was taking a break from cramming for two midterms that I had to take this morning (I watched the movie last night). I had been studying for most of the day and decided to make something to eat and watch the movie for a while to take a break from the books, and right about the time when I realized that Will Dormer's (Al Pacino) inability to sleep was to play a major role in the plot of the film, I fell asleep. A little irony that I found too amusing not to share with you all. Will Dormer is a detective assigned to a case in Alaska about a high school girl who has turned up dead. He finds out early on his mission that he is being accompanied by an agent from Internal Affairs, sent along due to some suspicion about some of Dormer's cases.
(spoilers) Dormer immediately finds himself adored by a young police woman in Alaska (I think the name of the town was DeafMute or something) who has studied his every move and all but idolizes him, an adoration to which he tiredly responds with a roll of his eyes. He's seen this sort of thing before, and he just wants to get the job done and get back to Los Angeles and away from all of these backwoods people. The film is a typical investigation film until a great scene where the cops find the victim's backpack and put it right back where they found it, and then announce on the local radio stations that they need the backpack that the girl left a party in, offering a reward. They set up a trap at the location, knowing that only the killer knows where it is so they hope he'll show up to get it.
In a great case of police stupidity, one of the officers accidentally presses the button on a megaphone, alerting the killer just as he arrives and setting up a good chase sequence through the fog. This is where the real conflict of the movie is introduced. Dormer accidentally shoots his partner, the Internal Affairs officer sent to investigate him. Knowing that he will be blamed for the murder, he covers it up, making it look like it was the killer that shot him, and thus beginning an increasingly tangled web of lies (have you ever noticed that lies tend to lead to more lies?). We may begin to wonder for the rest of the film how likely it is that Dormer would have been blamed for the shooting had he simply told the truth in the first place. Sure, it would look suspicious since the guy was investigating him, but that is hardly proof of premeditated murder. He would have been innocent until proven guilty, and his guilt is not likely to have been proven beyond what was obviously an accident.
The movie ultimately teams up Dormer with the original victim's killer, Walter Finch (played by Robin Williams in a decidedly uncharacteristic role), who also may not have had such malicious intentions in the first place. Dormer crosses the line of the law when he decides not to tell the truth about how his partner died, and now he is going even further by teaming up with the killer to frame the girl's boyfriend for the deaths of both victims. This forces us to question a lot of assumptions that we take for granted about authority figures and criminals in modern society.
We assume that the police are there to protect us (although, we should always keep in mind the famous and all too true quote from some source that I don't know beyond the Skinny Puppy song that I heard it in, `The police used to watch over the people, now they're watching the people.'), and that they are the good guys out to catch the bad guys. In this case, assuming that Finch is telling the truth about what happened, the bad guy is not necessarily a bad guy (although certainly not the most admirable character), and the good guy, the police officer, is even worse than the bad guy because he's trying to frame an innocent kid of murder.
This also brings up another point, however, since the kid is also not the most admirable character. The movie not only makes us examine our assumptions of authority and criminals, but also of ourselves as we find ourselves hoping that they succeed in framing this kid, who we dislike enormously because of his inflammatory temper and his tendency to beat his girlfriend, who sought the company of the man who killed her in order to get away from him. In that way, he certainly played a role in her death. He was definitely not the most nurturing guy in the world.
Will Dormer is the main character in the film, charmingly named because of his inability to sleep, which is undoubtedly brought on because he certainly has a lot on his mind. He has been assigned to find the killer of a high school girl, he has inadvertently shot and killed his partner who was investigating him for Internal Affairs, he finds himself identifying with the criminality of the suspect that he is trying to bring in, his own plan of covering up his own murder is falling apart, and all of this is taking place in a location where the sun never sets. No wonder he can't sleep.
Up to this point, this is a great psychological thriller. There is relatively little action put together to add up to an enormous amount of tension, but this conversely makes you wonder about some scenes that seem to have been thrown in just to have a little more action in the movie, when next to none was needed. There is, for example, a scene where Dormer chases Finch across a lot of loose logs on a river and ends up getting trapped underwater, which is one of the more tired action sequences of the thriller genre. This scene stands out so far from the tone of the rest of the film that it seems to belong in a different movie.
But more importantly than that, the movie really starts to fall apart at the end when Dormer and Finch turn against each other and the movie devolves into a typical shootout. This is the point where the film lets us know that these two characters were trying to put a plan into action that could never work, they were on a doomed path. So don't try this at home, kids. The whole set-up of the interaction of Finch and Dormer falls apart into low-rent action, which reminds me of the ignored opportunities of Hollow Man and, even more, the similarly obligatory ending of the recent Robert DeNiro film 15 Minutes, which was a tremendously well-made film with a conclusion that is just as much on auto-pilot as this one is.
We get the nice poetic justice as the two major criminals in the film shoot each other simultaneously, and Dormer is given a chance to do a deathbed conversion, redeeming himself in the eyes of Ellie Burr (the young policewoman played by Hillary Swank who admired him at the beginning but eventually discovered his secret), urging her not to throw the one piece of incriminating evidence into the river but to turn it in so this whole sordid mess can finally be resolved. Very nice, but this convenient ending just doesn't do justice to the effective tension created in the first half of the film. Like the two main criminals, the ending is almost a polar opposite of the beginning, leaving us enormously entertained but eventually disappointed.
And in case you were wondering, both of my midterms today went remarkably well.