Flasz On Film

If you ask any fan of Christopher Nolan’s work, and there are plenty of those around, what they think about his 2002 Insomnia, chances are you will hear they don’t like it all that much. After all, it bucks Nolan’s interests in playing with structure and it’s sparse in spectacle so there isn’t much to hang your hat on, at least upon first glance. However, a keen eye will latch onto the unusual pairing of lead actors, Al Pacino and Robin Williams, at the forefront of the narrative, especially since Williams was cast “out of character” as a cold and calculating villain in this re-telling of a rather formulaic Norwegian thriller. Moreover, the film’s central conflict between these two Hollywood titans functions as Christopher Nolan’s dry run for The Dark Knight and a subtle homage to Michael Mann’s Heat, one of his favourite movies of all time.  

But it’s not everything. Insomnia hides way more underneath its superficially formulaic nature and could easily stand toe to toe with some of Nolan’s best regarded works like The Prestige or Inception, at least as far as thematic depth is concerned. That’s because on top of its cultural connection to Nolan’s later work, Michael Mann or even the simple fact it finds the great Robin Williams playing against type and opposite Al Pacino himself, it is also a stealth companion piece to another modern masterpiece – The Silence of the Lambs in that it explores the travails of a female detective asserting herself in a male-dominated professional field. And nobody ever talks about it.  

I find it at least a little bit ironic that Hillary Swank’s name is almost never mentioned in the context of this movie. Granted, you could argue that anyone could be easily overshadowed by the dueling egos of Al Pacino and Robin Williams, but this phenomenon is much more entrenched in the narrative and thematic spheres of the film, which – also ironically – was written by a woman, Hillary Seitz, who also never gets a mention for her work in adapting the 1997 original. And what she did with the original story is quite remarkable because the Stellan Skarsgård-starring direct-to-TV Insomnia was nothing more than a pot-boiling slow-burner focused squarely on the inner conflict of its inarguably despicable lead character.  

As written by Seitz and directed by Nolan, Insomnia harbours an undercurrent of feminist struggle beneath the primary moral conflict the movie is remembered for the most. If you refocus your own gaze and try not to pay too much attention to Pacino and Williams flexing their acting muscles and engaging in a titanic struggle for character supremacy, you shall see that the film is also a story of a young up-and-coming detective Ellie Burr (Hillary Swank), who plays host to detectives Dormer (Pacino) and Eckhart (Martin Donovan). She’s full of vigour and hope and, simply put, looks up to Dormer as a professional role model. She read all the books, she knows all the procedures, she plays by the rules. And she works the hardest in her team. In fact, she almost looks out of place with her fervent professionalism and an impeccable work ethic.  

However, nobody takes her seriously. Her colleagues roll their eyes when Ellie insists on recreating the crime scene where Eckhart is accidentally shot by Dormer. She is told to pipe down and take a break whenever she insists on pursuing what she (rightly) sees as an intriguing inconsistency between the evidence she found on the scene and what she was told in witness testimonies. Instead, she must suffer through lurid jokes and snide putdowns her male colleagues indulge in after work, something she barely pays attention to, by the way. This only informs the viewer that this is something Ellie accepts as normal. She’s never taken seriously, and she probably navigates such frat house boys-will-be-boys nonsense so frequently that she effectively tunes it all out. Seitz writes her as a stranger in a strange land, an interloper in an alien world. Which she, de facto, is. 

Ellie knows she is effectively wasting her potential in this arse-end-of-nowhere detachment which is so far up North that in the summer the sun never sets, and the darkness never leaves in winter. Her only hope to advance her career comes in the form of interacting with Dormer. She sees him as her ticket to a “real” career in law enforcement in a big city down South where cops do their jobs correctly, everyone works hard and where effort is met with appreciation; at least this is what she believes. What she does not know is that her idea of what “real” police is like, especially since she looks up to Dormer, is far from reality and that Dormer is not a good role model for anyone, let alone an ambitious and impressionable upstart like Ellie. And Dormer knows this.  

In fact, Dormer’s entire journey as a character is coloured by his interaction with Ellie as much as it is informed by his interaction with Williams’ Walter Finch. What is more, I would venture a suggestion that his pathway is altered more profoundly by his relationship with Hillary Swank’s paragon of virtue than by what’s commonly thought of as the central clash with the killer he was sent there to help track down. Sure, the fact Finch witnesses Dormer accidentally (or otherwise) kill his partner has a profound effect on Dormer, because it is Finch’s blackmail that helps Dormer uncover his own corrupt moral core. However, if it hadn’t been for Ellie’s involvement, Dormer’s character journey would have unfolded completely differently because he would have simply driven down to Finch’s lake house and murdered him in cold blood. Which is what happens in the 1997 original.  

This is where Hillary Seitz made the most powerful – yet still arguably subtle – alteration to the script. In the original story, the morally decrepit detective faces off against the blackmailing killer and takes care of him. Plain and simple. Then, in the epilogue, the other police officer who was tasked with investigating the shooting of his partner, shows up at his apartment and leaves the bullet case on his table, as though to indicate it was for him to decide whether to come clean or to bury the evidence. Jonas Engström (Skarsgård’s character) is then seen driving back home, understandably shaken. This is to inform the viewer that he is not going to face the consequences of his actions and that he chooses to live in his own private purgatory.  

What the original script omits, however, is that the detective who gives Engström the bullet case effectively corrupts herself in the process. It is, after all, her choice not to go up the chain and instead to brush the issue under the carpet. She may be inflicting hell upon Engström in the process, but her decision leaves her culpable. It’s up to her to follow the protocol and play by the book and she chooses to bend the rules, or even break them.  

Now, Ellie doesn’t end up corrupting her soul. However, she comes incredibly close to doing so because of her desire to help Dormer save his career. The woman we have observed – albeit in the corner of the frame – as she painstakingly followed all the rules and showed immense resolve in the face of utter lack of professionalism on behalf of her colleagues, was about to throw away her professional purity to save a morally corrupt detective she thought was worth sacrificing herself for. She was ready to stain her own soul to make sure the man she looked up to was spared the fall from grace in dishonour. But Dormer stopped her before she could make a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life. That way, Dormer dies having done at least one thing right – he saves an innocent human life from following down the trail of ends-justify-the-means morally corrupt relativism he had blazed in the past himself.  

But the point is that Dormer wouldn’t have been able to make the right call, if he had not met Ellie in the first place. He was so far gone that he needed a lighthouse – a resplendent paragon of virtue in human form – to break out of the downward spiral to hell. Detective Ellie Burr was the hero in the end. Her stalwart resolve, unmatched work ethic and unbreakable spirit are the reasons why Insomnia, as re-written by Hillary Seitz and directed by Christopher Nolan, is a story that ends on a high note. It is not the solemn downer its predecessor ended up being, but rather an uplifting piece that, while still shrouded in Nordic ambiguity, leaves the viewer filled with hope. Because Dormer’s soul was saved by an angel. An angel called Ellie Burr.  

What’s truly sad, however, is that nobody ever noticed that. To most viewers, and that includes Nolan zealots as well, Insomnia is just that little movie sandwiched between Memento and Batman Begins. It’s an afterthought, just as Ellie’s character is to everyone around her. What is more, even those who choose to take a closer look at this movie are unlikely to see past Pacino and Williams. They will happily ignore and overlook Hillary Swank’s phenomenal performance as this story’s underdog-turned-paladin, even though she is the driving force of the narrative and the de facto Clarice Starling of Insomnia. And that, my dear friends, is a social commentary in its own right.