Last Summer we saw the Al Pacino/Robin Williams version of this movie, so it was a no-brainer to watch the subtitled Norwegian original when it came across a movie channel. I thought it would be interesting to see the difference between European and American perspectives on a twisted detective flick and I was right.
Insomnia stars Stellan Skarsgaard in the role Pacino played, as the big rep city detective flown into a small Arctic community to solve a teenage girl’s murder; none of the other actors have a name in America, though they are reasonably good nonetheless. Skarsgaard, though, has appeared in a number of US films including the recent cable miniseries Helen of Troy and the cool Frankenheimer/DeNiro hit Ronin. His detective is even more out of place than the American version: called up from Oslo, he’s only come over from the Swedish police a year before after embarrassing his chief while Pacino only had to deal with the flight to Alaska from LA. No one, of course, plays tired as well as Pacino and so I’m not surprised Skarsgaard didn’t match him on that score.
Director/writer Erik Skjoldbjerg has crafted a more complex, subtle version than Christopher Nolan could squeeze through the American studio filter. I’m not quite sure why this is so, but American films always need to have circumstances and dialog more explicit than films I see made in other parts of the world and the difference shows up in this film as not wasting 10 minutes of screen time. Characters don’t need to be so decidedly good or bad, which means our detective can collaborate with the real baddie (Williams’ character in the American version) even though the novelist meets the same end.
Recommended
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