A Neglected Nolan Film Well Worth Revisiting We all know that it's our real or perceived weaknesses, mistakes and transgressions that keep us awake at night; left to themselves they can run riot. Unable to rest, we lose perspective, our memory plays tricks on us and guilt - justified or not - can become overwhelming. Soon we're caught in a circular trap, from which we can only be freed by sleep or the morning.
It's precisely this insomnia that haunt's Nolan's third film; Dormer (Pacino) is haunted throughout by an assortment of vulnerabilities. Some of these are a simple fact of the passage of time and humanity - the threat of a turned ankle after a jump, slipping under the logs giving chase, an inability to sleep in bright light. Others are real guilt, an increasing doubt of his own motives, or the temptations of being away from home and whatever his more 'normal' family life might be. This is all given force by the parallelisms between Dormer and Robin Williams's character, and the Internal Affairs investigation with the central murder.
These are all strengths of a script that, unusually for a Nolan film, isn't written by the director. I haven't seen the film it's a remake of, but certainly it's a film that unlike many of Nolan's other films (which he at least co-writes), its main female characters are complex, interesting creations with genuine agency. Photographed by long-term collaborator Wally Pfister, the film is soaked in cold, almost metallic shades (amongst others) of blue, lending a sense of the eerie to a film which, driven by a Pacino performance that for the most part avoids his latter-day tendency to self-parody, brilliantly evokes the way an inability to sleep feels all the day round. Unlike many Nolan films, the story is entirely linear; but it retains his obsessions with how our past informs our present, and the film plays with that as the flashes of visons that haunt that Dormer suggests a suppression of his past that threatens to overwhelm in - and by the end, does.
This is often seen as a minor Nolan film, on the way to the more successful and lauded films that lay in his future. But it deserves attention for all these reasons, not to mention the much missed Robin Williams's haunting and controlled performance. If Inception would take the cinema of dreams to somewhere new, this asks uncomfortable questions about what makes us unable to sleep ... and therefore to also dream. Showcasing as it does a deft thriller plot, his customary technical excellence and female characters who are better drawn than his usual, this is a corner of the Nolan filmography ripe for a revisiting.