Movie Review Insomnia

Insomnia (2002) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Written by Hillary Seitz 

Starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney, Martin Donovan, Nicky Katt

Release Date May 24th, 2002 

Published May 23rd, 2002 

How many times has Al Pacino played a cop? About half as many times as his cohort Robert Deniro, but that is still a lot. However, Pacino has never played cop in a film directed by Christopher Nolan. That is an important distinction. As Nolan has shown, in his previous efforts Memento and Following, that genre is a dirty word. With Nolan at the helm, you know you’re not in for your typical police procedural.

Insomnia has Pacino playing Detective Will Dormer, on loan from the LAPD to an old friend who is the sheriff of Nightmute, Alaska. Dormer and his partner Hap are momentarily escaping an internal affairs investigation that threatens to destroy Dormer's high profile reputation. On arriving in Nightmute, Dormer is met by a young local cop named Ellie Burr (Hillary Swank) who fills us in on how well known Dormer is by discussing his many big cases which she studied while in the police academy.

As for the case itself, a teenage girl was found in a garbage dump having been beaten to death. The case breaks quickly as Dormer and the local cops lock onto a suspect after the discovery of the dead girl’s personal items. The discovery leads to a stakeout that goes horribly wrong, leading to the death of Will's partner and a cover-up that calls Will's integrity into question.

While investigating under the noses of the local cops, Dormer uses some questionable tactics to discover a suspect, a mystery writer named Walter Finch (Robin Williams). Somehow, Finch knows Dormer's secret and tries to use it against him. This begins a cat and mouse game where the mouse proves to be smarter and more adaptive than the cat. 

Insomnia isn't about police procedure and chase scenes, it's about atmosphere and intellect. Williams and Pacino play fantastic cat and mouse with Williams tormenting Pacino with his inability to sleep due to Alaska's never-setting summer sun. Both Williams and Pacino are spectacular as they leave their previous screen chewing person's behind.

Director Christopher Nolan brilliantly uses the never-ending sunlight of this unusual and unlikely location as the perfect backdrop for this intensely dark suspense flick. As Pacino drives around at 3 in the morning and the sun shines, it is as if the light turned his mind into a prison shining a harsh light on his guilty conscience and many regretful decisions.

Nolan is becoming one of the best directors in the world, an auteur whose genius lies in keeping both the audience and his characters off balance. In Memento it was Leonard's short term memory, in Following it was the young man’s writer's block and guilty conscience, and in Insomnia it's Dormer's inability to sleep that keeps the audience and the characters from ever getting comfortable or complacent.

Insomnia is a strong move into the mainstream for Christopher Nolan who manages to make a Hollywood film without compromising his artistic vision and Auteurist style.

Movie Review A Haunting in Connecticut

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) 

Directed by Peter Cornwell 

Written by Adan Simon, Tim Metcalfe

Starring Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Amanda Crew, Elias Koteas 

Release Date March 27th, 2009 

Published March 26th, 2009 

Virginia Madsen is a very talented actress. This assertion on my part is well demonstrated in her Oscar nominated performance in Sideways. However, her name on a marquee inspires the kind of fuzzy, hazy, disconnected state that only Pink Floyd could properly describe. Place her name above the title The Haunting in Connecticut and the combination inspires the kind of yawn that can only be described as jaw breaking.

The Haunting in Connecticut is a movie that commits the cardinal sin of movies. It is not merely bad, it's boring. Not boring merely in the way that one could be doing better things with their time but boring in a way that one is subjected to. As if locked in a room with blank walls and no windows. Gene Siskel put it best 'This movie does not improve upon a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.'

Virginia Madsen is ostensibly the star of The Haunting in Connecticut though one might fairly claim ennui as the film's true marquee element. Madsen plays a country mom to a cancer-addled son, played by Kyle Gallner, who decides to move her family to a suburban home closer to the local hospital. Because the family is not rich she accepts the first home in their price range. This, despite the fact that the home used to be a working funeral home. Poverty is stronger than the darkly ironic, fate tempting idea of moving her dying son into what used to be a funeral parlor.

Dad (Martin Donovan) is forced to stay in the country for work reasons but the rest of the family is coming to the creepy new house. The rest of the family include a toe-headed little brother and a pair of female cousins whose living arrangements are somewhere in the exposition, likely during the onset of my movie-long malaise.

Of course it's not long before the ghosts begin tossing plates and the shrieking musical score begins trying to convince us that all of this is pretty scary. I remain unconvinced. Along the way we greet a few more unhappy clichés including conventional horror movie misdirection where people hear noises that they think are scary but are really cats or birds or relatives.

There is even a brief digression into the child in danger plot as the youngest children are briefly menaced by apparitions. This is thankfully brief but hey if you are going to fly by on cliché you may as well throw them all in there. Clichés at the very least are familiar and even distracting yet somehow even they come off as boring in this film. It's difficult to describe this level of boredom. Imagine Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller mode reading the instruction manual for a ford fiesta. Now take that down a notch and you can imagine something close to what I felt during The Haunting in Connecticut.

This is surprising considering the 'true story' the film is allegedly based on. Al and Carmen Snedeker are a real family who moved into what was a former funeral home in Connecticut back in the mid-80's. After moving in they did indeed report a number of creepy goings on. Their story inspired Ed and Lorraine Warren, the spiritualist con artists who crafted the Amityville Horror legend years earlier, to come and craft an elaborate haunting for the Snedekers.

Not surprisingly, the whole thing became a bestselling book and now this movie. Except that the movie seems to have left out some of the more juicy and entertaining details. Not the ghosts, the bodies allegedly stuffed in the walls, or the alleged séances that may or may not have taken place as a regular bit of funeral home business. That's all in there somewhere, I think, I may have blacked out briefly. 

No. It's the part where Al and Carmen cop to having been raped by apparitions repeatedly over the TWO YEARS they lived in this house. Disturbing on so many levels? Yes, but definitely not boring. This detail was dropped from the movie either in a nod to good taste (Booo) or because writing this detail into the movie would take more effort than the writers were willing to put into it. 

Or, even more likely, it was a commerce over creepiness decision. The film is more bankable as a PG 13 feature not featuring ghostly forced sex. I'm not sure what this says about me but I cannot honestly tell you whether I preferred the boredom or the creeptastic, ungodly alternative left out of the final film. I guess we'll never know. The Haunting in Connecticut is what it is, an utterly mind numbing bore.