Thus conscience does make insomniacs of us all...

Rating: Null/10 (14 May 2003)

SPOILERS. You have to hand it to Al Pacino's detective in this movie. He goes for more than six days and nights without sleeping. (Dormer -- what an ironic name for an insomniac.) He even loads up on Alaskan beer and becomes so woozy he can't find the men's room and he *still* can't sleep. He drags himself from room to room. On one occasion when he runs there is no spring left in his step, only heavy weight. There were times I felt, "I AM that man!" Well, he feels pretty crummy because (1) he planted some evidence down in LA to ensure the conviction of some genuinely guilty scumbag, and (2) he accidentally (maybe) shot and killed his partner who was about to turn on him for Internal Affairs. He's so beat that he simply doesn't remember whether he did it deliberately or not. This isn't the tragic, distant young Don of The Godfather. Nor does he rant, flail his arms, and roll his eyes as he did in some later roles.
Hillary Swank is in some ways just as interesting and in some ways less so. She doesn't have as much a part as Pacino. And she sounds lispy, like a model who has taken acting lessons, although this impression is in error because she was pretty good in "Boys Don't Cry." The interesting aspect of her presence in this movie is that she looks far, far better as a beautiful young woman than she did as a tender young man. My God, those plump lips, those big incisors, those slightly feline eyes -- if she were an animal she'd be a small predator, maybe an ocelot. She can lisp anytime she wants.
Robin Williams. A deadly serious role. I never realized before how much he looks in profile like an old crone. He gives a good performance, a perfectly pragmatic novelist who's only motive, post facto, is seeing that no one suffers because of guilt or conscience. He's so rational -- so REASONABLE -- in his arguments with Pacino, telling Pacino how pinning the accidental shooting AND the murder under investigation on an innocent, but not entirely saintly, third party is the right thing to do that, yes, it doesn't seem like the worst conspiracy in the world. The major flaw as far as Williams' character is concerned is not the fault of the actor but of the writers, who turn him into a conventionally violent all-guns-blazing maniac at the end. The novelist we've come to know and love would just not act like that, anymore than Hannibal Lecter would pick his nose at the dinner table.
The story is almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been for Pacino's detective to experience, yet it's not at all dull. The location shooting includes British Columbia, familiar ground now, but has some spectacular shots of Alaska's mountains, rivers, and wet small-town streets. At those latitudes the sun may set but it's always daylight. This doesn't bother the natural fauna though. At 2 AM, sunlight or not, the birds are as much asleep as the people and it is as quiet as the dead of night should be. Unsettling territory. The director spices things up with brief inserts reflecting Pacino's hypnogogic hallucinations. They're kind of interesting in themselves. Were you ever about to fall asleep and suddenly seemed to see insects or some other repugnant things in front of you? They're fairly common experiences, yet no one can explain them. All we know is that they don't seem to come from the same part of the brain that generates dreams. There is no humor in the film, but there is action. Most notably a chase through the town's streets and alleys and through it's lumberyard. Nothing spectacular though. No jumping across rooftops or anything. Neither actor is Clint Eastwood. Instead they leap up onto hurricane fences and kind of tumble over on the other side. Pacino loses his footing at a critical moment.
It's genuinely worth watching, although it's grim. It embodies a kind of philosophy in which good cop/ bad cop = the same cop. And it's morally stern. Pacino finally gets to sleep.