Insomnia

Touch Of Evil is one of my favorite movies, and hands down my favorite Orson Welles movie, for many, many reasons. One of them is the way that Charlton Heston's Miguel Vargas has issue with Orson Welles' Hank Quinlan's methods of investigating crimes. Quinlan plays fast and loose with the rules, he bullies, he relies on inscrutable hunches, and when he decides who is guilty, he frames the evidence to fit the narrative. Over the course of the movie, Vargas descends into madness and begins to mirror Quinlan's ethically dubious methods in an effort to prove Quinlan wrong about the case they're both investigating, and this is where Welles the director pulls off one of the best twists in movie history; Quinlan is right about the prime suspect. Even though he planted evidence, he was right, and Vargas was wrong. Both men's lives are ruined, though; Vargas has sacrificed his morality for a futile effort, and Quinlan's past cases come under review and his reputation is shattered. I bring this up because Insomnia has a lot of elements of Touch Of Evil. This is a blessing in some ways and a curse in others. On the plus side, Insomnia uses the same muddled morality in both halves of the movie. The first half, when Al Pacino is investigating a murder in remote Alaska and accidentally shoots and kills his partner ... except maybe it wasn't accidental. And then he lies about it and doctors evidence. This comes back to bite him in the second half, when the killer in the murder case comes into play and there's a tense game of cat and mouse as they have information that could doom each other, and both feel justified in their actions enough that neither wants to go down. Pacino and Robin Williams (the killer) play off each other very well, and both get to play out of their normal wheelhouse. Pacino's cop is quite, pensive, and as his insomnia takes hold, unhinged, but not in the trademark Pacino way. Meanwhile, Williams is educated, cunning, disarming, and completely icy. There isn't a shred of the manic comedian he could be on display here. The direction is far from the norm for Christopher Nolan; far more restrained (in a good way), using the landscape to its fullest advantage, and using simple quick edits to drive home Pacino's mind and morality falling apart as he wrestles with the insomnia caused both by his conscience and the permanent daylight the town is in. Nolan's worst tendencies -- a refusal to tell the story in the simplest way, an insistence that the movie must serve some higher artistic purpose -- are also absent here; this is the most straightforward Nolan movie, perhaps ever. On the down side, though, Nolan is no Welles. The direction is, perhaps, too plain. I'm not expecting something like Touch Of Evil's iconic opening tracking shot, or the party scene with the overlapping dialogue and two important plot points happening off-screen. But there's also no flourish, no style. This is as by the numbers a police investigation movie as it gets. When your movie has obvious lineage to something with such notoriety, a director is putting their movie in a shadow by being so plain. As far as story goes, what makes Evil so damned good is the parallel arcs of Quinlan and Vargas, and how the twist reframes the whole movie; the "twist" here (it's more like a curve) accomplishes nothing, and without a parallel and intersecting track to contrast against it, it feels like a big shrug. And Williams' character can't be a parallel/contrasting track, 1) because he's already morally bankrupt when we meet him, so there's nowhere to go, and 2) he's introduced an hour into the movie. The conflict is so much less impactful when both men are morally flawed from the get-go instead of one having a fall from grace. And as far as the mystery goes, it's not given any mystery at all. It offers up one red herring and dismisses him immediately, and the only other suspect admits to it, so the mystery element is more or less dead in the water. Insomnia is a fine movie. Not a great movie, not a bad movie, but fine. It could be more if it tried to do something different with the movie it's clearly emulating, or maybe tried not to emulate it. But it puts itself behind the eight-ball and never lets itself get out from there, resulting in a movie that's watchable but not as much as it should be.