In Insomnia Al Pacino plays Detective Will Dormer, who is flown in to a small secluded town in Alaska to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. Pacino's character is as per usual with Pacino characters, is burdened with a troubled past and the accompanying soul-straining assload of guilt. The film opens with Dormer being flown in to the town accompanied by his partner, Hap. The opening scenes of the film show someone performing shadowy actions involving cleaning blood stains off of clothing alternated with tracking shots of the bizarre, breathtaking Alaskan landscape: rippling rock faces marbled with deep-blue streaks of super-compressed ice. Rock-leaved Bible of geology, indeed.

As the film develops, it is revealed that Dormer has engaged in misdeeds not inconsiderable in his efforts to overcome villainy, that he and others are being pursued by a that-guy-who-was-hunting-down-Jean-Vallejean-esque Internal Affairs agent, and that Hap is getting ready to fink out everyone in an effort to save his own skin. To top it all off, Hap and Dormer have arrived at the town during one of Alaska's summers, during which it is daylight pretty much all the time, making it tought to get any sleep.

The perpetual daylight theme is the first instance in which the third main character, of the film, the first being Dormer, the second the killer played by Robin Williams, comes to play a role in the plot. That third character is God, as represented by his avatar, the 'undefiled works' of the American landscape: director Christopher Nolan makes repeated use of establishing shots in which the works of man, buildings, highways and the like, are set off as puny foreground elements against the breathtaking splendor of the immense mountains, forests and lakes of Alaska. Dormer will find his actions frustrated again and again by natural phenomena: fog, water, and above all, the 24-7 gush of sunlight that bestows upon him the Insomnia of the title.

And why is God being such a dick? Well, you see, it has to do with the misdeeds through which Dormer has been able, over the course of his career, to infalliably capture the bad guys. It seems he was not above faking evidence and resorting to other sorts of illegal subterfuge. "Vengance", as the Lord is fond of saith, "is mine" (italics added). The repeated shots in Insomnia of the vast and overpowering Alaskan landscape (at one point the motel in which Dormer is staying is shown set against a massive cliff, as if entombed in stone) seem to add a postscript for Dormer's edification: "And not yours, you two-bit gumshoe!" Render unto Caear and all that. The light that so frustrates Dormer's attempts to get some shuteye is of course (wait for it) the Light of Truth, an effective, if rather irksomely unsbutle metaphor.

And so, Dormer, alone in the middle of a vast wilderness with his guilt, his murderous quarry, and God, struggles toward a fate which will not be revealed here but is pretty much spelled out in 72 pitch type encased in blink tags about a third of the way into the movie. The film ends with an action by supporting character, a small-town cop played by (of all people), Boys Don't Cry star Hilary Swank, that is either an affirmation of legitimate law and order, or a truckload of liberalist corn, depending on one's point of view.

Miscellaneous notes: (1) The murderer in the film, as played very effectively by Robin Williams, is Dormer's Mephistopheles, his evil counterpart: a creepy sociopath who spouts therapy-culture bullshit about having "made mistakes" and wanting to "get on with his life" ("Who needs guilt?" he seems to say, "it's just excessive emotional baggage"). Williams is so good one suspects he may be in danger of being typecast in this sort of role. Beats Mrs. Doubtfire II, I guess. (2). Reviewing the film in a recent New Yorker, the usually on-it David Denby asks if authorities of the samm Alaskan town couldn't have found a cop closer than Los Angeles. Well, yeah, probably, but this is emphatically not a realist crime drama. The film is, as we have established here, an allegory. In fact, the whole plot collpses like the Sacramento Kings during overtime if you think about it for more than five minutes. So don't. (3). Christopher Nolan has this thing in his films where a female character will sleep with the male lead. They don't fuck, they just grab a nap, fully dressed. This happens in Nolan's first film, Memento, and again in Insomnia. What's up with this? Nothing against mutually consenting adults catching a few winks together with all their clothes on, but still, it's kinda weird...