Insomnia

After suddenly becoming Hollywood’s hottest filmmaker, Nolan may have missed out on an Academy Award thanks to Gosford Park (grrrrrrrrrrrrr) but he did get the chance to direct his first non-indie movie. The budget was 5x that of Memento and nearly 8,000x that of Following! While, just like in those movies, there were only three major characters, here all three were played by Academy Award winners. Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank each brought their A-game and should be lauded.

The bad news is that this is the Christopher Nolan movie where he had the least creative input. It was part of a big trend in the early 2000s for Hollywood to remake a foreign film from a few years earlier. This was based on the 1997 Swedish film starring Stellan Skarsgard the same year as his breakout American role in Good Will Hunting. Hey, I just realized Sean was the villain in one Insomnia and Gerry the hero in the other!

The more vitriolic, less photogenic pair of friends from that movie.

Anyway, since he didn’t have input on the story – this is actually the only film he’s ever directed where he didn’t work on the screenplay – it’s no accident that this was the only Nolan film (out of the eight he made) from the first decade and a half of this millennium not to make the IMDB Top 250. Still, it’s based on a highly acclaimed movie, and it’s terrific!

Al Pacino has been accused of mostly parodying himself in recent decades, but this was one of his best performances since his 1970s prime. He really adds depth to the grizzled old cop we see in so many movies, as his character has spent his entire career putting his neck on the line trying to do the right thing but now might have to see it all come crashing down. Should it? Robin Williams plays a charmingly sociopathic author who tries to make us question what I said earlier about who’s the hero and who’s the villain. Hilary Swank is caught in the middle, as an officer who has no idea about the hidden drama but whose idealism might merely be due to youthful inexperience.

The cinematography and sets are great; you feel like you’re really transported to Alaska and get a sense of the nightmare that results when it’s around midsummer and you never know when it’s day and when it’s night.

Outside my window at midnight during my June 2018 Alaskan cruise.

At 3:00 AM.

Hey, how’s that for a metaphor for the subjective nature of good and evil, especially because it’s always daylight and Williams’s character is such an affable killer?

Warner Bros. had great intellectual property to work with and hired top-level talent for both in front of and behind the camera. It would have been hard to go wrong and they certainly didn’t!

Bottom Line: Great job by Nolan as a director-for-hire.

Up Next: He really makes his mark on the business!