Arctic Noir

Rating: 7/10 (17 June 2009)

"Insomnia" can be regarded as an example of neo-noir, the type of film which uses modern cinema techniques while trying to capture the spirit of the classic films noirs from the forties and fifties. Other examples of neo-noir include Polanski's "Chinatown" from the seventies, Lawrence Kasdan's "Body Heat" from the early eighties, or the more recent "L.A. Confidential". A 17-year-old girl named Kay Connell is found murdered in a small Alaska fishing town and two Los Angeles detectives Will Dormer and Hap Eckhart are sent to assist the local police with their investigation.
Dormer, the older of the two, is regarded as a star of the LAPD, responsible for putting a number of major criminals behind bars. He is so famous that his investigations are studied as textbook cases at police academies. Yet he and his partner Eckhart are now themselves under investigation, as the LAPD's Internal Affairs department suspect that they may have been guilty of planting false evidence against suspects.
The key moment in the film comes during a stakeout which Dormer has arranged to lure the killer into the open. The operation goes wrong, and the suspect escapes into the fog. In the ensuing confusion, Dormer shoots and kills Eckhart by mistake. As none of the other officers witnessed the shooting, they assume that Eckhart was shot by the fleeing murder suspect, and Dormer does not enlighten them. He knows that Eckhart had been offered an immunity deal in exchange for his testimony in the Internal Affairs investigation. As Dormer was indeed guilty of planting evidence against one man, a murder suspect named Dobbs, Eckhart's testimony could have put him in jail. Given that he had an obvious motive to kill his partner, Dormer fears that no-one will believe that Eckhart's shooting was accidental.
Ellie Burr, a young female police officer with the local force, is assigned to investigate Eckhart's shooting. She was once a great admirer of Dormer, whose methods she studied at police college, but now starts to suspect that her idol may have feet of clay and that Eckhart's death may not have been an accident. To make matters worse for Dormer, he is blackmailed by Kay's killer, a local crime novelist named Walter Finch, who knows the truth about Eckhart's shooting. Finch offers to remain silent about this matter on condition that Dormer directs suspicion away from him by planting false evidence implicating Kay's abusive boyfriend Randy.
A complex plot of this nature was one of the hallmarks of film noir. Another hallmark was an atmosphere of moral ambiguity, often involving corruption on the part of the police or others with a responsibility for enforcing the law. Dormer is a morally ambiguous character, not altogether unsympathetic despite his wrongdoing. He was led astray not by financial corruption but by his passion to bring criminals to justice; he believed firmly that Dobbs was guilty and deserved to be punished, and that tampering with the evidence was a lesser evil than letting such a man go free. The title is a reference to Dormer's inability to sleep; he blames this on the perpetual daylight of the Alaskan summer but there is a strong implication that his feelings of guilt and anxiety are also to blame. Ironically, his surname is derived from the Latin "dormire", meaning "to sleep".
Watching Al Pacino in this movie is like watching a masterclass in acting. Every expression, every gesture, even the slightest inclination of his head is full of meaning as his character is slowly driven mad by his predicament. Dormer is a haunted, guilt-ridden figure, torn between his desire to do the right thing and his desire to preserve himself and his reputation. Rather surprisingly Pacino did not receive an Oscar nomination for this film. The Academy seem to have lost interest in him in recent years; he has not had a single nomination since his long-overdue "Best Actor" award for "Scent of a Woman" (which is far from being his best film). He receives excellent support from Hilary Swank as Ellie and from Robin Williams as Finch. It came as something of a surprise to me to see Williams, normally the hero, as a villain. He had played a terrorist in "The Secret Agent", but that was a relatively minor role.
A third hallmark of film noir was its distinctive visual style, generally marked by expressionistic, moody black-and-white photography. The spiritual "blackness" which gives these films their name is often matched by a literal darkness. It would probably be impossible to recreate this look in a modern film, but the challenge for neo-noir directors is to create an equivalent visual style for their productions. Kasdan manages this well in "Body Heat", a film whose a colour scheme is dominated by blacks, reds and oranges, emphasising the feelings of heat and passion. (That film, which deals with an adulterous affair, is set against the backdrop of a Florida heatwave).
Whereas the atmosphere of "Body Heat" is sultry and tropical, that of "Insomnia" is cool and Northern. Even though it is midsummer we are always aware that we are in the Arctic. Nevertheless, Christopher Nolan is also able to bring a distinctive look to his film. In some ways this look is the opposite of film noir; while that genre was dominated by night and shadows, "Insomnia" is dominated by grey skies, mists and a perpetual pale, milky sunlight. The fog in which Dormer shoots Eckhart can be seen as symbolic of the moral fog of confusion and ambiguity in which the story takes place. The high standards of acting and direction mean that this is one of the better crime thrillers of recent years. 7/10