"I'm so sorry, sir, he's really a good cop." "I'd hate to meet the bad cop," smiles Williams imperturbably - an exquisite one-liner. When he is brought in for questioning, an enraged Dormer tries to punch Walter and is dragged off by his shocked colleagues. This is the dysfunctional wreck who must confront the movie's villain, coolly introduced by Christopher Nolan very late on in the movie: Walter, a local author of detective stories, played by Robin Williams, who had "befriended" the victim and who is to involve Pacino in a fascinating duel of wits. He is like Travis Bickle in Scorsese's Taxi Driver, staring psychotically into his fizzing seltzer. With his senses jammed permanently open, Dormer becomes twitchily, manically distracted: sounds are abnormally loud, light is unnaturally bright. From here, he descends into the hell of eternal vigilance. But it's 10 o'clock at night! "I knew that," smiles an embarrassed Dormer, his very last moment of regular humanity. When he has just arrived, Dormer gazes out of the window at the brilliant sunshine and on checking the time - 10 o'clock - declares he wants to pull the victim's boyfriend out of class at school for questioning. Yet he is still capable of flashes of humour. He is someone who has been strip-mined of ordinary emotion by life and by the job. Dormer - a man whose marital status is an unremarked mystery - is simply beyond love and sex. He graciously accepts this compliment with playful raillery and charm there is nothing precisely fatherly about his burgeoning relationship with her, nor is he asexual, yet it is immediately clear that Pacino's cop does not have the emotional means to make Swank this movie's romantic interest. When he comes into town, Dormer is immediately bathed in girlish hero- worship by the bright young local officer Ellie Burr, intelligently played by Hilary Swank, who gushingly reveals that his brilliant work on an LA case was the subject for her college thesis. Pacino is far more frazzled, more virile, more rangy - but with a kind of fathomless age suggested in those hooded, lizard-like eyelids that look as if they could be pulled out about six inches from his head. The 62-year-old Pacino looks very different from the hawkishly greying Don imagined at the end of The Godfather Part II. With his puffy, lionised face, the black expressionless eyes and the laryngeal death-rattle of his voice, he effortlessly conveys the horror of sleeplessness. So Al Pacino is inspired casting as the haggard detective Will Dormer, the policeman with the world's most ironic name. Only those people who don't suffer from insomnia have the luxury of thinking it's a disturbing metaphor - when the simple physical condition itself is what is truly disturbing. His investigation goes horrifically wrong and his bad conscience, his festering awareness of career mortality and his screwed-up circadian rhythms mean that he is driven slowly mad with sleep deprivation: a kind of fatal familial insomnia of the soul. A grizzled LA detective is brought in to show the local cops how to take down a villain this scary - a detective who has accepted this godforsaken assignment because he is in trouble with the Internal Affairs department back in the big city. Instead of darkness and shadow, the movie takes place in unforgiving, continuous brightness, the 24-hour daylight of a small town in Alaska in the summer months, where a teenage girl has been discovered beaten to death, her body showing signs of ritual killing. Nolan has made of it something pleasingly old-fashioned, yet viscerally and sensually modern, delivering an icy, sub-zero burn to the mind. Christopher Nolan, the British-born director of those compulsive, time-bending dramas Following and Memento, has straightened out the narrative kinks to give us a magnificent blanc-noir thriller, a remake derived from a Norwegian original starring Stellan Skarsgard, directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg in 1997. This could this be The Big Sleep for a new generation.
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