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I have to admit you really lived up to your reputation
I had no idea Christopher Nolan's Insomnia was a remake when I saw it in 2002. (I did know I was one of two people in the theater who burst out laughing at a joke the script intended to be obnoxiously unfunny, because a mutual friend had been inflicting the exact same setup on us for weeks in a sort of determinedly absurdist way: "What has two thumbs and needs to finish his Greek homework? This guy!" The entire audience twisted around to see what was wrong with us. It was kind of great.) I'm not even sure when I became aware of the original; I suspect sometime after I had realized that I would watch Stellan Skarsgård read the phone book, which is sort of what he was doing for most of The Avengers (2012). Criterion had put out the DVD, so it may have gotten onto my radar when I started noticing them. In any case, it was only two or three years ago that I saw Erik Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia (1997) for the first time, at which point I fell in love.
I do not want to describe it as a darker film than its remake, because that is visually incorrect (and I have ambivalent feelings about using dark as an all-purpose adjective), but it is a more complex story: a less comfortable experience. What I remember of Will Dormer (Al Pacino) is an honest cop who once made a morally sympathetic, legally no-good decision, falsifying evidence in order to convict a known child-killer who would otherwise have slipped free; the case and Dormer's involvement in it are about to come under review, but this is a separate issue from his presence in Nightmute, Alaska, where he and his long-time partner have been sent up from Los Angeles to assist with a local murder investigation simply because they are very good at what they do. Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård) has a somewhat more nuanced reputation—an expatriate Swede who used to be chief inspector in Stockholm before he was caught with his non-metaphorical pants down, banging his star witness, he is now serving out his face-saving time in Tromsø, which is not the ass-end of Norway only because north on most maps is up. He's cool, brilliant, thorough to the point of obsession when it comes to his work; he's also a bit of a laughingstock and a lot of a loner. No parents, no children. No regular lovers. A brother whose death when Jonas was eleven is the first thing he can remember lying about. His only human connection seems to be with his Norwegian partner, Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal), whom we later find has worked with him only about a year, but they have the unasking familiarity of an established couple. On the flight up from Oslo, Erik sleeps with his head on Jonas' shoulder, Jonas fishes a pen out of Erik's shirt pocket; on the job, Jonas is the bad cop—curt, looming, unpredictable—while Erik is the affable, disarmingly absent-minded good one, and they get results. Over in Hollywood Alaska, meanwhile, Dormer's relationship with his partner is in a tailspin: he has just discovered that the loyal Eckhart (Martin Donovan, although I admit that at this distance I had to look it up), feeling both conscience-bound and under pressure from internal affairs, is planning to testify against his old friend in the upcoming review.
So from the start, while the precipitating event is the same in both movies—a fog-bound shootout causes the protagonist to mistake his partner for the suspect, fatally wounding him—and the same plot twist ensues—he conceals his mistake successfully from the police, but the killer has seen him—the implications for the characters are wildly different. However accidentally and horrifically, Dormer has removed an obstacle from his life. Jonas has thrown a fjord-sized monkey wrench into his. It's not enough that he shot the wrong man, that he's on his own now in this town where the sun is white-bright and the language is wrong and his team still snickers sometimes behind his back; he's lost the one person who could have kept him stable, grounded him before he slipped further off the rails from sleeplessness and guilt and a murderer's cat-and-mouse. That last is less of a factor than in the remake, which foregrounds the head games as is perhaps inevitable in a film co-starring Robin Williams. Like the film noir of which it was designed as the conscious visual reverse, the original is more fundamentally concerned with how easily the lines of cop and criminal can blur, as even sleep-deprived Jonas is all too aware. The killer is responsible for the death of a teenaged girl. He calls it an upsetting accident; Jonas insists it was a crime of passion. A middle-aged man with a beautiful fifteen-year-old throwing herself at him, but only as the author of her favorite crime novels? Of course he wanted more. And when he takes one of the dead girl's classmates for a drive, Jonas lets his hand slide off the stick-shift and between the student's microskirted thighs. Or maybe he doesn't. We have already seen him hallucinate dead Erik in a hospital, conversations in a deserted alley; her face is only bored and sullen, not aroused or repulsed or willfully indifferent. We never see them in long shot. Fragments, only, like the stutter-skip tracking of Jonas' exhausted eyes. Just so (only more so, days later and he still hasn't slept in the light-humming box that is his hotel room, filled with the sounds of the sea and his own breathing like the glare of the day), we have no way of determining exactly how much of his aborted sexual encounter with a young hotel clerk took place and how much he fantasized in the moment his eyes, for that one overcome second, stuck closed. He's dreaming awake. But no matter what, the boundaries between what Jonas imagines and what Jonas allows himself to do are fraying badly, and we know they weren't all that sound to begin with. Criminal investigation is much less threatening than this erosion of self, his floundering entanglement on the other side of the law that starts as a lie of omission—his interviewing officer assumes the fleeing killer shot Erik and in the moment Jonas doesn't say otherwise, it becomes the official report—and progresses into phone calls, meetings, stalking on both sides, framing a witness while still trying to cover his own tracks and figure out a way to get ahead of the killer on one hand and his colleagues on the other, which is no easy prospect after thirty-six, seventy-two, we have stopped being able to count how many hours with no more than jolted eyeblinks of unconsciousness, which is not the same as sleep. And what are we watching, anyway? A good man falling to pieces? The last rags of a lost cause's humanity stripped away? The remake tells us: Dormer committed one crime and made one mistake and he is punished for one by the other, dying in the apprehension of the killer; there's a production-code redemption in that. Jonas is left alive to face how completely he's fucked up his life. Go on, three guesses, tell me which one I prefer.
I am not even sure the two movies are the same genre, now that I think about them. Insomnia in Norwegian is cool and richly colored, obscuring with light as a traditional film noir frames with darkness, full of silences and half-notes and so much not an action movie that its few moments of speed and violence are as jarring to the audience as to the characters. American, it ends in a blaze of gunfire; it’s a thriller. Which I enjoyed when I saw it with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dgr8bob all those years ago at Brandeis, but Skjoldbjærg's is the film that feels like not sleeping. Biosphere's tapping, buzzing electronic score sounds like the loops your brain gets stuck in, working the same image over and over. I've seen the movie three times now and I find I'm increasingly unsure of what can be proven to have happened in it, how far back its protagonist's sleep-starved unreliability extends—by the time the credits freeze on that first, final full-screen darkness, you feel like you haven't slept for a week.
I mean, I usually haven't. But I still think it works on people who aren't me. Somebody who likes a good film blanc find out.
I do not want to describe it as a darker film than its remake, because that is visually incorrect (and I have ambivalent feelings about using dark as an all-purpose adjective), but it is a more complex story: a less comfortable experience. What I remember of Will Dormer (Al Pacino) is an honest cop who once made a morally sympathetic, legally no-good decision, falsifying evidence in order to convict a known child-killer who would otherwise have slipped free; the case and Dormer's involvement in it are about to come under review, but this is a separate issue from his presence in Nightmute, Alaska, where he and his long-time partner have been sent up from Los Angeles to assist with a local murder investigation simply because they are very good at what they do. Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård) has a somewhat more nuanced reputation—an expatriate Swede who used to be chief inspector in Stockholm before he was caught with his non-metaphorical pants down, banging his star witness, he is now serving out his face-saving time in Tromsø, which is not the ass-end of Norway only because north on most maps is up. He's cool, brilliant, thorough to the point of obsession when it comes to his work; he's also a bit of a laughingstock and a lot of a loner. No parents, no children. No regular lovers. A brother whose death when Jonas was eleven is the first thing he can remember lying about. His only human connection seems to be with his Norwegian partner, Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal), whom we later find has worked with him only about a year, but they have the unasking familiarity of an established couple. On the flight up from Oslo, Erik sleeps with his head on Jonas' shoulder, Jonas fishes a pen out of Erik's shirt pocket; on the job, Jonas is the bad cop—curt, looming, unpredictable—while Erik is the affable, disarmingly absent-minded good one, and they get results. Over in Hollywood Alaska, meanwhile, Dormer's relationship with his partner is in a tailspin: he has just discovered that the loyal Eckhart (Martin Donovan, although I admit that at this distance I had to look it up), feeling both conscience-bound and under pressure from internal affairs, is planning to testify against his old friend in the upcoming review.
So from the start, while the precipitating event is the same in both movies—a fog-bound shootout causes the protagonist to mistake his partner for the suspect, fatally wounding him—and the same plot twist ensues—he conceals his mistake successfully from the police, but the killer has seen him—the implications for the characters are wildly different. However accidentally and horrifically, Dormer has removed an obstacle from his life. Jonas has thrown a fjord-sized monkey wrench into his. It's not enough that he shot the wrong man, that he's on his own now in this town where the sun is white-bright and the language is wrong and his team still snickers sometimes behind his back; he's lost the one person who could have kept him stable, grounded him before he slipped further off the rails from sleeplessness and guilt and a murderer's cat-and-mouse. That last is less of a factor than in the remake, which foregrounds the head games as is perhaps inevitable in a film co-starring Robin Williams. Like the film noir of which it was designed as the conscious visual reverse, the original is more fundamentally concerned with how easily the lines of cop and criminal can blur, as even sleep-deprived Jonas is all too aware. The killer is responsible for the death of a teenaged girl. He calls it an upsetting accident; Jonas insists it was a crime of passion. A middle-aged man with a beautiful fifteen-year-old throwing herself at him, but only as the author of her favorite crime novels? Of course he wanted more. And when he takes one of the dead girl's classmates for a drive, Jonas lets his hand slide off the stick-shift and between the student's microskirted thighs. Or maybe he doesn't. We have already seen him hallucinate dead Erik in a hospital, conversations in a deserted alley; her face is only bored and sullen, not aroused or repulsed or willfully indifferent. We never see them in long shot. Fragments, only, like the stutter-skip tracking of Jonas' exhausted eyes. Just so (only more so, days later and he still hasn't slept in the light-humming box that is his hotel room, filled with the sounds of the sea and his own breathing like the glare of the day), we have no way of determining exactly how much of his aborted sexual encounter with a young hotel clerk took place and how much he fantasized in the moment his eyes, for that one overcome second, stuck closed. He's dreaming awake. But no matter what, the boundaries between what Jonas imagines and what Jonas allows himself to do are fraying badly, and we know they weren't all that sound to begin with. Criminal investigation is much less threatening than this erosion of self, his floundering entanglement on the other side of the law that starts as a lie of omission—his interviewing officer assumes the fleeing killer shot Erik and in the moment Jonas doesn't say otherwise, it becomes the official report—and progresses into phone calls, meetings, stalking on both sides, framing a witness while still trying to cover his own tracks and figure out a way to get ahead of the killer on one hand and his colleagues on the other, which is no easy prospect after thirty-six, seventy-two, we have stopped being able to count how many hours with no more than jolted eyeblinks of unconsciousness, which is not the same as sleep. And what are we watching, anyway? A good man falling to pieces? The last rags of a lost cause's humanity stripped away? The remake tells us: Dormer committed one crime and made one mistake and he is punished for one by the other, dying in the apprehension of the killer; there's a production-code redemption in that. Jonas is left alive to face how completely he's fucked up his life. Go on, three guesses, tell me which one I prefer.
I am not even sure the two movies are the same genre, now that I think about them. Insomnia in Norwegian is cool and richly colored, obscuring with light as a traditional film noir frames with darkness, full of silences and half-notes and so much not an action movie that its few moments of speed and violence are as jarring to the audience as to the characters. American, it ends in a blaze of gunfire; it’s a thriller. Which I enjoyed when I saw it with
dgr8bob all those years ago at Brandeis, but Skjoldbjærg's is the film that feels like not sleeping. Biosphere's tapping, buzzing electronic score sounds like the loops your brain gets stuck in, working the same image over and over. I've seen the movie three times now and I find I'm increasingly unsure of what can be proven to have happened in it, how far back its protagonist's sleep-starved unreliability extends—by the time the credits freeze on that first, final full-screen darkness, you feel like you haven't slept for a week.I mean, I usually haven't. But I still think it works on people who aren't me. Somebody who likes a good film blanc find out.
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Nine
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I don't know who'd publish it! Or who'd read it that isn't already on my friendlist!
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You're very welcome. I don't know if it's Skarsgård's best role, because his resume is formidable and I haven't even seen all his English-language movies, but he does an amazing job with Jonas. I have not mentioned the character played by Gisken Armand, but I am more and more impressed with her every time I see the movie. And I love the way it looks, even if I hate that look when it's happening inside my own head. Let me know what you think!
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For Nolan, this film is a bridge, proving he could work within the bounds of the studio system and keep big-name stars under control. The fact Pacino gave a performance, instead of phoning in bombast as he does these days, says volumes. Without it, he would not have the personal capital to invest into Batman Begins, which in turn gave him the ability to make projects like The Prestige and Inception.
And... were it not for Nolan's Insomnia, would there be a Criterion edition of the original? Sometimes just bringing attention to the original is a great gift.
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If it gave him the clout to do The Prestige (2006), I'm happy.
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I don't think it's an irretrievable misstep and I love everything about The Fisher King (1991), Robin Williams included. I just really prefer Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia—I rewatch it often enough that it's worth owning. I've never really felt like revisiting the remake, except maybe to take closer note of the differences sometime.
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And obscuring with light also strikes me as something you're unlikely to find in American films (though you'd be able to tell me! You've watched many more!)--I feel as if American cinema just can't get beyond the light-truth-revelation trope, whereas you'd think anything done that unrelentingly would just cry out for subversion--even in America.
Although I've never suffered insomnia in anything even remotely approaching the way you have, I have had periods of sleep deprivation where I've lost, briefly, the sense of distinction between reality and dream. The only times I've hallucinated, it was related to sleep deprivation. Your description of the Skjoldbjaerg film *vividly* recalled those sensations to mind.
Go on, three guesses, tell me which one I prefer
Oh, let's see, production-code redemption versus the protagonist left alive to face how completely he's fucked up his life? Hmmm, thinking, thinking, thinking. Yeah, I think I've arrived at the correct answer.
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I didn't know that. I try avoid dubbed versions of anything unless there is some amazingly compelling reason, like a voice actor I adore, and I can't actually think of a case where that happened. Yeesh.
And obscuring with light also strikes me as something you're unlikely to find in American films (though you'd be able to tell me! You've watched many more!)--I feel as if American cinema just can't get beyond the light-truth-revelation trope, whereas you'd think anything done that unrelentingly would just cry out for subversion--even in America.
I'm not quite sure how to answer. I was just trying to remember what new movies I've seen in theaters this year—I've been able to come up with Beasts of the Southern Wild, Moonrise Kingdom, The Avengers, and it's entirely possible that's it. (I really wanted to see The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, but it's not American and I missed it anyway.) I don't have a high opinion of mainstream American film, but I don't think our national cinema is a lost cause, either. I can remember going to see movies two and three times a month in 2007.
That said: I mentioned a character to
I just wish I lived in a country that admitted ambiguity more easily in its art.
The only times I've hallucinated, it was related to sleep deprivation. Your description of the Skjoldbjaerg film *vividly* recalled those sensations to mind.
You make it sound like a contagious haunting. I'm not sure that's wrong.
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Thanks, Hollywood, for turning that into a girl-that-must-be-saved-so-I-can-redeem-myself motif. :-/
You make it sound like a contagious haunting. --You are a known vector of contagion.
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It's not completely dire—she has a gun, she does fight alongside Dormer. She figures out what he's done. She's green, but she's not stupid. But her Norwegian original never needed to be in danger in the first place. It feels not just like a bow to convention, but part of the same scrubbing-out of ambiguity as the backstory and the endings of the two protagonists: Dormer, even compromised by his past mistakes, has to be a hero. That's just not a concept that has anything to do with Jonas.
You are a known vector of contagion.
Aw. You say the nicest things.
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I'll be curious to hear what you think!
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YUP.
I saw the Norwegian one first, and haven't seen either since 2002. I don't especially remember the plot, but I still do remember feeling like making it into an American action movie was fully missing what'd made the first one so good. Though Hilary Swank is very hot, so there is that.
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Thank you! I have seen considerably more film noir since this post and stand by my assessment. I have also gained considerably more experience of the Production Code and it's right up there for terrible things to happen to the American sense of ethics.
I saw the Norwegian one first, and haven't seen either since 2002. I don't especially remember the plot, but I still do remember feeling like making it into an American action movie was fully missing what'd made the first one so good. Though Hilary Swank is very hot, so there is that.
I hope she got her own neo-noir.