Insomnia Movie Al Pacino
Yamila Comejo
Insomnia begins with a scene that opens a thousand police procedurals: a man on a plane looks at a grainy photostat of a corpse. We all know how to read it, too: she's just been murdered, he's been called in to solve the crime. It's comfortable and familiar. Until the detective takes out a ballpoint pen and starts idly scratching out the victim's face.
The first act ofInsomnia is filled with moments like that; scenes that begin like a run-of-the-mill police procedural, but go slightly, uneasily off-kilter. I've seen it four times now, and it still makes me queasy. A lot of this has to do with Stellan Skarsgrd's excellent performance as Jonas Engstrm, a man whose guilt is making him lose his grip on reality. Scratching out the victim's face on the plane flight up is only the first scene that makes clear that Engstrm is not the sanest guy you'll ever meet. He smells the vicitim's hair during an autopsy, then caresses her face until he notices a female detective staring at him:
Engstrm, it turns out, is in Norway because he can no longer work in Sweden after being discovered "in intimate conversation" with a witness. And if you know the undying and irrational emnity Swedes and Norwegians have for each other, you know that he's fallen far. To make things worse, he's been assigned a case in the far north of the country, where the sun doesn't set during the summer. In the plus side, he's working with longtime partner Erik Vik, played by Sverre Anker Ousdal. Vik is Engstrm's link to human warmth, and they relate to each other like an old married couple: Engstrm pulls things out of Vik's jacket pocket without asking, Vik falls asleep on planes with his head on Engstrm's shoulder. So when Engstrm mistakenly kills Vik while trying to apprehend a suspect, he goes a little crazy. And by "a little crazy," I mean "batshit insane." Here he is at his worst:
He doesn't look too together there, obviously. He's hiding behind that door because two local teenagers came into the room while he was planting evidence to frame one of them for murder. And he hasn't slipped out of the room because he's watching them have sex. We already know he likes one of the two teenagers, Frya (played by Marianne O. Ulrichsen, who was also the production's assistant director):
And we know he likes her, because, despite her tender age, he's slid his hand up her skirt while questioning her. So: how do you make someone this unlikeable the hero of your movie? You make the villain even less likeable. The killer that Engstrm is after is a writer named Jon Holt, and he's seen Engstrm shoot his partner. So Holt and Engstrm become secret sharers, and the revolting pleasure Holt takes in finding someone else who has killed (and in being able to maniuplate him) puts the audience squarely in Engstrm's column. You can get a sense of Bjrn Floberg's performance as Holt from the scene where Engstrm first meets him (on a cable car, in a scene that owes a little to The Third Man):
Holt's infuriating smugness is critical to the way Insomnia works. There's no limit to Engstrm's cold detachment (this is a man who thinks baby kittens are "disgusting"), but he's downright charming next to Holt.
The second key to this movie is that Skarsgrd's performance and Skjoldbjrg's direction make it clear that Engstrm is paying a great psychological toll for the things he has done. It's not called Insomnia for nothing, and even before Erik's death, we know that Engstrm isn't sleeping well. But as the movie progresses, Skjoldbjrg portrays Engstrm's insomnia in increasingly subjective ways. The slow fades-to-white that Skjoldbjrg uses in the second half of the movie do a very good job of conveying the horror of being unable to sleep in a place where it's dazzlingly bright all the time.
As you've probably noticed by now, Skjoldbjrg's palette is heavy on the whites and sickly greens (for what it's worth, so is Scandinavia). Insomnia is never pretty to look at; this is deliberate. You're meant to feel as isolated from and alienated by the surroundings as Engstrm.
As the atmosphere of guilt builds, the structure of the traditional police procedural is left far behind: Insomnia is a psychological study, not a thriller. Nowhere is this more clear than in the debriefing scene towards the end of the movie. After we've seen Engstrm cover up a shooting, frame an innocent kid for murder, molest a teenager, shoot a dog, nearly rape a hotel clerk, and look away while a paralyzed man drowns, we hear a clueless police officer tell him, "I have to admit you really lived up to your reputation. Never gives up...not until the case is solved." It's the last shambling attempt the movie makes to look like a regular police procedural, and Engstrm's reaction (he walks out) mirrors the viewer's. Which is not to say we're totally identifying with him. The excrutiating last shot is a head-on long take of Engstrm driving out of town. He goes through a tunnel, and for once the movie takes us out of the dazzling brightness and into more traditional noir lighting. Skarsgrd doesn't look at the camera as he drives; he's got a permanent thousand-yard stare. It's a measure of how well we know Engstrm by this point that it's a relief he doesn't meet our eyes.
Yeah, man, I don't mean to shit on Nolan's version; it's all right (Robin Williams is great) -- but I saw it right after the Skjoldbjrg's version (mostly because the whole time I was watching Skjoldbjrg's I kept saying, "No *way* Pacino did that," and I wanted to see how they made that movie into something he'd do). Anyway, I'm glad you liked the post.
There can be no comparison in quality or sensibility between the two versions of the film - Nolan's remake is a Hollywood hollow out of a superbly complex, unvarnished original.
All Nolan's characters, and their relationships, are based on strict Hollywood stereotype, starting with Pacino's 'supercop' routine in the first team breifing;in the buddy act with his partner; and especially in the doe-like worship of the female cop (and the horribly cliched development of this relationship).
The plot is needlessly expanded with the background story of a previous frame up, and this plotline is used to ridiculous effect when Robin Williams tries to blackmail Pacino on the basis of his knowledge of Pacino's misdoings - how could he possibly know about Pacino's past in this way?. This device turns Williams into a 'Basic Instinct' style omniscient supervillain. In the original, the villain's character is, in contrast, both complex and utterly plausible.
Nolan's films is superbly made, but a standard issue money making machine. The ending is a gross cop out.
There are two depressing things about this:
* many critics do not seem able to sense the difference between real and fake.
* Nolan's Memento was much closer in sensibility to the original Insomnia than his remake. I really think he must have been got at by the Hollywood machine
Dan Usiskin
Great comments. I wrote a bit about the two films a few years ago on criterionforum.org and I'll add my points here too.
I agree with Dan, I had some hopes for Nolan tackling Insomnia head-on after his excellent films Following and Memento. I was sadly disappointed (and I think it was telling that the DVD was most interesting for the way one commentary broke the film up by shooting order, not for the film itself!) It was that bad it has kept me away from Batman Returns and The Prestige for now, although I have got the DVDs for when I'm ready to watch a Nolan film again (similar to the way Mission to Mars scared me away from De Palma for his next two films!)
I just couldn't believe that the remake was literalising all the themes treated so delicately in the original. The partner threatening Pacino was ham-fistedly done, compared to overhearing people talking about his indiscretion with a witness, that may or may not have happened in the original. And in a sense it didn't need to have happened - we live in societies where just a rumour of indiscretion or improper conduct can get people disciplined or fired. That sequence in the original is incredibly important in bringing the viewer in to Engstrom's paranoia and to suggest a reason for his mental state.
I think this also reflects in the scenes with the hotel clerk and the girl in the car. Is he wanting them to report his conduct to the police because he can't do it himself?
And the dog - changing that really upset me. It was just too convenient for there to be a dead dog lying around in exactly the place Pacino's character goes to be sick, let alone for it still to be around when he returns later on. Plus killing the dog raises a lot of moral questions that an audience doesn't have to be confronted by with the corpse. Every situation is twisted around to make the character more sympathetic in the remake, while in the original, as you pointed out in your review the audience is constantly confronted with the character's actions.
It is very interesting that two Crierion films have probably the best use of the stare to brilliantly close out a film, albeit for different purposes: Insomnia and The Long Good Friday!
Don & Colinr,
Yeah--what you said. Don't be too harsh on Nolan though; you can't make a movie like Insomnia with a star. Anybody who comes from the independent world is bound to have problems the first time they fully enter the Hollywood system. Although The Prestige is no Memento, I think Nolan is figuring out how to make interesting movies from inside that system.
Asked if he has ever experienced insomnia, the actor, who incidentally is now blond, replied: "Yeah. Sure, I have, but sometimes it was purposeful. Being out for a few nights and I didn't want to go to sleep, but I think I can relate to being sleep-deprived because there were periods of my life where I found it difficult to either go to sleep or get up early and have to wander around in the middle of the night."AdvertisementAdvertisement
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