2002 rewatch: The flawed but promising Insomnia remains Christopher Nolan's brightest night

2002 rewatch: The flawed but promising Insomnia remains Christopher Nolan's brightest night
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Every week, Entertainment Weekly is looking back at the biggest movies of the summer of 2002. As audiences struggled to understand the new post-9/11 world order, Hollywood found itself in a moment of transition, with upcoming stars and soon-to-be-forever franchises playing alongside startling new visions and fading remnants of the old normal. Join us for a rewatch of the first true summer of Hollywood's strange new millennium. Last week: Devan Coggan and Christian Holub travel to a galaxy far, far away with Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Next week: Ben Affleck becomes the (first) young Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears.

INSOMNIA, Al Pacino, Robin Williams, 2002, (c) Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection
INSOMNIA, Al Pacino, Robin Williams, 2002, (c) Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection

Everett Collection Al Pacino and Robin Williams in 'Insomnia'

DARREN: I've never met anyone who calls Insomnia their favorite Christopher Nolan movie, but the director's third feature film has a crucial, even career-making place in his filmography. It's one of those movies Hollywood just doesn't make anymore — a chilly midbudget R-rated thriller with less action than slow-boil tension — and it offered the Memento director a critical middle step between his attention-getting independent work and the zeitgeist-altering blockbuster work ahead.

As EW wrote at the time, this was "a $50 million studio picture starring three Oscar winners," and I worry a lot of the effect of watching Insomnia today comes down to appreciating how absent a lot of its traits (positive and negative) are now. Had it been made in 2022, I assume Insomnia would have become a longwinded True Detective-y miniseries, unless Blumhouse spared some pennies on a smaller cast in a more accessible location.

When I saw Insomnia on opening weekend, I was a devoted Memento head who loved Heat. I was ready for Nolan working with Al Pacino as a cop, and I remember being very struck by the upside-down casting of Robin Williams, just a few years off from playing Dr. Clown Nose in Patch Adams, as a late-arriving murderer. I didn't love the movie upon rewatch — partially because I've now seen the original Norwegian Insomnia, which is much sleazier and more nerve-jangling in its ambiguity. Pacino now looks a bit more mannered than I remember him. Williams is still very scary. Hilary Swank is present. And the part where Detective Fred Duggar (Nicky Katt) asks "What has two thumbs and likes b---jobs?" is very possibly the funniest moment in any Christopher Nolan movie.

Leah, how did the movie play for you in 2022?

LEAH: To be fair the Nolan Hilarity Index is not a high bar, but I hear you. It's also his only post-Memento movie, aside from Dunkirk, to come in anywhere near under two hours — though he still added almost 25 minutes to the Norwegian original you mentioned, none of which seem strictly necessary. (Then again, it's kind of an American tradition by now to needlessly pad Scandi cinema, or just make it 60% dumber.)

Insomnia is a smart movie by any metric, though it also feels like you're watching Nolan come into his Nolan-ness in real time — all those little stylistic tricks and mousetraps set against the pure hoo-ha energy of Pacino. The actor, 62 at the time, plays Det. Will Dormer, an L.A. cop shipped up to a remote Alaskan village to solve the murder of a teenage girl. But you can't take the Bronx out of the man; I love when the dirtbag boyfriend calls him "a little prick in a leather jacket," and somehow lives to see another sunrise.

Of course the sun never sets in this town, which is the point. When an increasingly sleep-deprived Will accidentally shoots his partner (Martin Donovan) — or "accidentally"? — it's only the beginning of his unraveling; Williams' homicidal novelist Walter Finch knows what he did, and some of my favorite sequences happen when he's taunting him. (The rolling-logs scene! More nightmares over that homicidal lumber than anything in Inception). And I don't mind Swank as a sort of wide-eyed Opie, the cop so clean she can't imagine Will would ever steer her wrong.

Aside from the fact that it feels like nearly all of this could have been solved much sooner with a good eyeshade and a Tylenol PM, I still like watching Williams turn his avuncular charm into something so smarmy and strange. The sustained tension between Will and Walter really forms the core relationship of the story, but whose interplay did you enjoy most, Darren: wild-eyed Pacino with Plymouth Rock Donovan? Katt and his two thumbs?

DARREN: My answer is Maura Tierney with anyone. As hotel proprietor Rachel, Tierney makes the most out of her few scenes, suggesting a bleak good humor required to survive nightless summers and sunless winters. "There are two kinds of people who live in Alaska," she tells Will. "The ones who were born here and the ones who come here to escape something else. I wasn't born here." She never explains the last part — and she doesn't judge Will for his sins.

I'm not sure there's really another character like her in the Nolan filmography, all personality with zero backstory. Finch also stands out, even if his chatty monster is the prototype for certain Bat-hating antagonists. It helps that Williams and Pacino are so akimbo. The latter gives his Los Angeles cop traces of a Southern drawl, and exudes sleepless exhaustion with whiplashing temper and disorientation. But Williams plays Finch with a low-key slither — and sly warmth. When they meet, Dormer knows he's found a murderer, but Finch thinks he's found a pal.

Williams was one of the great stand-ups, and Tierney was just a few years from NewsRadio. I wonder if there's more mileage for Nolan in working with comedic performers, who can find some unexpected swerves in his dour-by-nature psychodramas. Certainly, the eerie warmth they both generate makes the rest of the movie feel a bit chilly. I'm not quite sure why we need the long scene where Dormer psychologically torments the dead girl's best friend into a confession (though I do appreciate that said best friend is played by Katherine Isabelle, a.k.a. Ginger from Ginger Snaps) And Finch's inability to hide a Very Important Dress from a visiting cop feels like a third-act knot solved with a chainsaw.

That said, a few set pieces that are gorgeous, from the surreal glacier-to-forest opening plane flight to the various showdowns in water-adjacent cabins. Nolan made full use of locations in Alaska and British Columbia, conjuring a beautiful landscape for Dormer's downward spiral. And isn't it weird, Leah, that Insomnia is basically the last movie Nolan ever made set in a non-fantastical present-day? The sludgy boyfriend has a Pantera poster: rude to metalheads, but I love stray bits of cultural detail, which may be why I struggle with the austerity of Nolan's more recent work.

Besides the log-rolling scene, what's your favorite set piece in the movie, Leah? And am I alone in wishing that Williams could've worked with Nolan again? (Surely Michael Caine could've taken a break and let Williams play just one mentor figure?)

INSOMNIA, Hilary Swank, 2002
INSOMNIA, Hilary Swank, 2002

Everett Collection Hilary Swank in 'Insomnia'

LEAH: Ooh yes the set pieces: For me it might be that whole gorillas-in-the-mist sequence early on when Walter comes back for the girl's backpack (as Will has explicitly baited him to do), and an errant, fatal megaphone basically throws the whole thing into chaos. For some reason it kept reminding me of that great dam scene in The Parallax View, except with an overactive fog machine. Do you think Will really didn't know that was his partner when he pulled the trigger? And either way, why not take, I don't know, a shot at his kneecaps instead of direct to the chest?

I like the hint of darker, Twin Peaks-y character stuff with Maura Tierney too — and even if Katherine Isabelle's lip-glossed Lolita is every Small-Town Bad Teen we've ever seen, it's fun to watch Pacino go full crazy on her at the garbage dump. When in doubt, just scream at an unaccompanied minor and threaten to drive her into oncoming traffic until she gives up the name you need! Hot tip from the LAPD.

There is one small hero I feel we would be remiss not to mention: the dead dog in the alley. When it first shows up, I thought that was just Nolan's way of reiterating that this place was bleak and would probably end badly for the visitors from Los Angeles. Au contraire, it's a plot point — we'll see that sad little terrier again when Will needs its body for a bullet discharge, and yet it never receives a medal for its service. Then again, no one really gets a backstory here, even the film's stars; if Will has a wife or a life back home beyond that pending Internal Affairs investigation, it's all left on the cutting-room floor (or maybe screenwriter Hillary Seitz just saw no reason to give him one, according to the laws of neo-noir.)

But yes, let's talk about Williams: He was only a few years past his Oscar win for Good Will Hunting and worked pretty intensely in the decade before his death, so it's hard not to speculate where else he might have taken his career once he started tipping away from the Mrs. Doubtfires and more toward the darkness. Though this role still tends to get mixed up in my head with the other fussy, friendly psycho he played that same year, in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo.

The delusion and self-pity of his character here — cheers to the man who conflates methodically beating a girl to death with being a tragic victim of circumstance — is a feat to pull off, and he does it very well. If we're dream-casting him in future Nolans though, I would have loved to see what he might have done to slice through the pure luxury-watch-ad nonsense of Tenet. But you tell me, Darren, where Insomnia falls in your own Nolan pantheon. (Feel free to give your rating in logs, or small unfortunate dogs.)

DARREN: I rank Insomnia right in the middle of Nolan's In trilogy — not as evocative a vision as Inception, powers of ten less annoying than Interstellar. And the middle is about where Insomnia belongs, I think, which is part of the reason why the years have been kind to it. There's an all-or-nothing quality to our blockbuster present, and it's rare to see a solid thriller with a genuine personality. A summer movie season with decently-budgeted, grown-up, downbeat films hitting the multiplex with some regularity? Only in our dreams, I'm afraid. Like Dormer says: Let me sleep.

Read past 2002 rewatches: