Hollywood remake compared to original Norwegian thriller

Film review: Insomnia

Like Unfaithful, the current thriller Insomnia is a Hollywood remake of a lauded European film. The original Insomnia is a Norwegian detective mystery movie made in 1997 and shown at the Critics Week section of the Cannes Film Festival. It was made by a "debuting young director" Erik Skjoldbjaerg, starring Stellan Skarsgard (Good Will Hunting), and is set in a place in Norway where the sun does not set during summer.

The lead character is a police investigator who comes from Sweden to look into the gory murder of a pretty, 17-year-old student.

The new version is set in Alaska, where seasonally the sun hardly sets. The detective comes from Los Angeles, and as played by Al Pacino, he is a man of great intellectual force, instinct, and power. Pacino’s Will Dormer is such a compelling character (he is strong, weak, complex) he could be at the center of a Shakespeare tragedy. This we see early in the film as Dormer gives instructions to the local detectives. It is clear he is in full command, the veteran and supreme authority in criminal investigation at work. The locals are in awe.

But as the movie progresses, we see Dormer in a different light–literally and figuratively.

Usually before, a Hollywood remake of a foreign classic was deemed inferior, a mere exercise in commerce and a matter of trivializing a great work. The 1997 version of Insomnia is too "new" to be called a chestnut or a classic but it is well-crafted enough within an ostensibly limited budget and it deals with big themes, that it is certain to live forever.

It is also a tight piece of psychological drama, ending on a note of irony that recalls the disturbing fate of the fascist police inspector in the Italian political thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

Skarsgard’s detective is morally clean-as-a-whistle except that sexual weakness rears its ugly head too. Pacino’s Dormer is also upright but stronger when it comes to sexual temptation.

Still, the makers of this new version must have seen elements in the story and the production that could still be improved, the only valid justification for a remake. Thus the Hollywood version.

The common critical reaction to a Hollywood remake is to tweet it, but director Christopher Nolan (who did the smart cinematic jigsaw puzzle Memento with Guy Pierce) has used every advantage at his disposal, chief of which is the production budget, to defy this anti-Hollywood bias.

He has set the tone of the story more sharply. The mood is darker. The visuals more haunting. The atmosphere more menacing. The pacing tighter. For the most part of the movie, this viewer is kept at the edge of his seat.

At the catalytic moment during the stakeout at the lakeside lair of the suspect, when a hazy, solitary figure emerges from the cloud-wrapped scenery, the audience empathizes with the detectives who want to pin that figure down. Only minimal fog blurs the vision of the cops in the Norwegian version. So moviegoers identify more emotionally, more tensely with Pacino’s Dormer when he accidentally and fatally shoots his buddy. In the eyes of the moviegoers, the poor–nearly zero–visibility completely absolves Dormer, which is not the case in the original version because the air is clearer there.

The chase scenes are also more riveting in the new version.

These are elements that make a conventional detective thriller work, but what lifts Insomnia (both versions) over many other good movies in the genre is its penetrating character study of a guilt-ridden individual. Such guilt is exacerbated by the fact that his relationship with his partner is conflicted (no such tension in the original). So here is a detective thriller that deals with the disintegration of a man who is otherwise rock-solid in his goodness and morality.

Instead of owning up to his mistake, Dormer starts to manipulate pieces of evidence, which could put an innocent man to jail and make the guilty one walk. And so his equally guilty mind, compounded by the unfading light of the midnight sun, has led to sleepless nights (hence the title), strange, irrational behavior, hallucinatory visions (he sees his dead partner in the moving crowd).

To heighten the moral dilemma of this insomniac, the movie pits him against an equal–the sought-after killer who claims he killed the coed accidentally.

In the lens of a sharp cinematographer, the distinctive features of moon-faced Robin Williams, who plays the killer, have never looked more bizarre–appropriately so. In terms of aura, Pacino exudes Shakespeare while Williams is plain Disney.

And with the parallelism, some contrast. A minor female character in the original film is expanded in the Hollywood version not only to accommodate the star clout of Hillary Swank (a former Oscar best actress for Boys Don’t Cry) but to show how this admiring rookie cop, potentially a future equal of Dormer, gradually discovers her idol’s dark side. In the end, it is all about the varying levels of guilt, evil, humanity–analyzed intelligently and dramatized evocatively, grippingly.