"There
are two types of people in Alaska: those born here and those
escaping from something." So says the woman who runs
the lodge where LAPD detectives Will Dorner (played by Al
Pacino) and Hap Eckhart (played by Martin Donovan) have booked
rooms upon their arrival in Nightmute, a halibut fishing town
in Alaska near the Arctic circle, to solve a murder in the
film Insomnia. The local police, including detective
Ellie Burr (played by Hillary Swank), postpone solving the
case until the two men, summoned by an old pal, police chief
Charles Nyback (played by Paul Dooley), arrive by seaplane.
Dorner, greeted at the seaport by Burr, insists on seeing
the corpse. When he examines the body of the murdered seventeen-year-old
girl, he immediately sees that in the past she had kinky sex
yet the murderer took the time to clean the body carefully
and clip the nails (which doubtless had traces of the murderer's
skin). Dorner, who has solved many famous cases, tells the
local police that small details are crucial in solving any
crime, and he is a master at psyching out suspects as well
as nonsuspects during interrogations. However, LAPD Internal
Affairs is investigating Dorner's crooked police methods,
notably planting blood obtained from a corpse so that a guilty
person will be convicted "without reasonable doubt."
Evidently, his partner Eckhart knows about his misdeed, as
they quarrel early in the film before we know anything much
about the ongoing Internal Affairs investigation. After examining
the body, he sets a trap for the murderer by releasing false
information that the victim's handbag was missing from the
murder cabin. In the following morning, the police lie in
wait outside the cabin, the murderer eventually appears, and
police charge the cabin to capture him, but he escapes through
floorboards to the shore and then eludes the pursuers by running
through the morning fog. Dorner, on seeing the murderer run,
fires a shot in the direction of a dark moving figure, only
to discover that he has killed Eckhart by accident-or maybe
deliberately. The murderer continues to flee but drops his
gun, which Dorner secretly scoops up so that he can later
implicate the murder suspect in his partner's death. Thus,
there are now two murders and two murderers, and Burr is reassigned
to Eckhart's homicide, which in time becomes less than routine.
After the botched attempt to trap the murderer, Dorner insists
on interviewing the dead girl's kinky high school boyfriend
Randy Stetz (played by Jonathan Jackson), who insists on his
innocence, blaming an unidentified rival lover; the victim's
best friend also fingers an older lover but does not know
his name. One day Walter Finch (played by Robin Williams)
anonymously calls Dorner at the police station to propose
a trade: Finch will not report Dorner's murder of his partner
if Dorner will likewise allow Finch, the murderer, to go free.
But Dorner thinks that he can outsmart Finch, whom he eventually
meets face to face. Finch, in turn, seems always more than
a few steps ahead of Dorner, literally so in a few chase scenes.
Much of the film involves the normal course of a police investigation
seen through the lens of two murderers trying desperately
not to be brought to justice, and an inevitable showdown bring
closure to the suspenseful saga. The excellently textured
film has several comic lines, intermittent flashbacks, and
easily identifiable plausibility flaws, with Dorner finding
that he cannot sleep because the sun never sets in the Arctic
midsummer. But of course the two murderers have dark personalities
that provide other reasons not to sleep peacefully. Directed
by Christopher Nolan, the film is a retake of a 1997 Norwegian
noir film of the same title. The scenery provides a cinematic
postcard of forests, snow, a glacier, a waterfall, and small
towns, but before booking a trip to Alaska, filmviewers should
know that much of filming was in British Columbia, Canada.
MH
I
want to comment on this film
