Insomnia: Christopher Nolan’s Unlikely Best Film?

All great artists have their masterpieces: Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Coppola’s Godfather, Guns N’ Roses‘s Appetite For Destruction. But all great artists also have their snobbish fans who snub their noses at these populist decisions and see — beg your pardon — true brilliance in some obscure, alternative work: Caravaggio’s real masterpiece is some pencil sketch he scribbled in Venice, Coppola’s actual greatest film is Jack, and GN’R's best album, undoubtedly, remains the tribute LP “The Spaghetti Incident.”

So it is with careful tread that I venture into that realm of snobbishness and suggest that Christopher Nolan’s relatively lo-fi 2002 thriller Insomnia, out on Blu-ray this week, may be the director’s greatest film. After all, this is the man behind Memento. The man behind The Prestige. The man who got America talking about a film where a dude dresses up like a bat and punches a dude dressed up like a clown with the social reverence usually reserved for Arthur Miller plays. But with the director’s new film, Inception, causing fervent debate between those who consider it his masterpiece and those who regard it as an overblown bore of a picture, what better time than now for a bit of Nolan revisionism?

So is Insomnia Nolan’s best film? Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell no. Really long answer: Well…

By most standards, Insomnia is a success. It made all of its $46 million budget back within two weeks, and received positive reviews when it came out. Rotten Tomatoes currently ranks the film at an impressive 92%. But as those of us who spend our nights braving the netherworld of online movie blogs and scribbling message board postings to The A.V. Club know, Chris Nolan standards ain’t most standards. Ninety-two percent is, at best, treading water in the Tomatometer-topping body of Nolan’s flicks. In his short career, Nolan has dominated both ends of the cinematic spectrum, delivering a genre-warping indie film told in reverse and a colossal blockbuster that injected new creative life to superhero flicks (Batman Begins), then topped all that with a sequel (The Dark Knight) that garnered critical praise, heaps of cash, and perhaps the greatest honor of all for a piece of pop entertainment: applied political subtext. Based on his continuing adoration from the online community, he may hold the world record for postponing the inevitable online fanboy backlash that is the bane of all popular figures in science-fiction (most notably the Wachowski Brothers).

All this makes Insomnia‘s otherwise-admirable 92% one of Nolan’s lowest Tomatometer scores to date. A relatively typical homicide thriller, Insomnia remains the only widely-released Nolan film not on the Internet Movie Database’s top-250 list, and in a 2002 Esquire piece declaring Nolan the greatest filmmaker working in America, Insomnia went conspicuously unmentioned.

Regardless of whether-or-not we can call Insomnia Nolan’s best film, we can certainly define it as the most naked representation of his skills. Just check the out the plot: A homicide detective, played by a haggard and subdued Al Pacino, flies up to a small town in Northern Alaska to investigate the brutal murder of a local teenage girl. Once there, he struggles with both the perpetual daylight of the polar state’s season and some looming guilt about his own questionable ethics while a wide-eyed local cop (Hilary Swank) tags along and the crime’s prime suspect (Robin Williams) cleverly eludes him.

What, no reverse narrative? No overlapping stories? No Joker? Pretty standard stuff, Insomnia is. Sure, there’s a bit of genre subversion in swapping the traditional night-scapes and dark alleys of noir thrillers for eternal sunshine, as well as a first-act shootout that jumbles motivations inventively, but for the most part Insomnia, narratively speaking, has more in common with A-to-B whodunits of the 1950s than the the 21st-century head-trips that would come to define Nolan’s work (as well as Adaptation, Synecdoche, New York, and the rest of contemporary cinema’s steady stream of films I must pretend to totally comprehend).

What we’re left with, in Insomnia, is Christopher Nolan as Man Behind the Curtain, the creator’s impressive wizardry momentarily turned off. And if the history of ambitious filmmakers has taught us anything, its that they tend to do their most timeless stuff when they quit trying to impress us and settle into a quiet craftsmanship. This is why Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, a gargantuan 2006 meditation on mortality that spans multiple centuries and ends with the explosion of a galactic nebula, didn’t garner an eighth as much critical acclaim as his follow-up flick about minor-circuit professional wrestlers that barely left rural New Jersey, let alone our solar system. Or why Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love did more with two actors and 95-minutes than the sprawling cast, frenetic editing, and rain of frogs that stretched the seams of Magnolia‘s 3-hour running time.

This leaves us with the question: is Insomnia one of these quiet masterpieces? Is Nolan, un-distilled and unfiltered through spectacle or subversion, a better director? Well… probably not. I wish I was the kind of cineaste who could honestly say he prefers lingering shots of a guilt-ridden Al Pacino cooler than a movie told backwards, but a movie told backwards is pretty fucking awesome. The lack of Nolan’s more bombastic trademarks, however, do allow some of his more subtle touches (present-but-overshadowed in his bigger films) to shine: the detached naturalness of his lead actors; well-choreographed action sequences that are simultaneously as frenetic as a Bourne film and as crisp and comprehensible as a western duel; and mesmerizing, fetishistic close ups of the human anatomy (Pacino’s exhausted face; the fingernails of a victim’s pale corpse).

But what makes The Dark Knight and the rest of Nolan’s more famous films (including, now, Inception) truly great are their ability to carry over the kind of old-fashioned craftsmanship displayed in Insomnia into new-fashioned stories. At his best, Nolan takes the raw materials that make a classic, solid thriller and reassembles them in a way that’s at once familiar and completely new. His 2002 thriller remains the only film where the director leaves the pieces alone. This may not make Insomnia his best film, but it improbably makes it his most unique.

Notable Special Features: A conversation between Nolan and Pacino.

Release Date: Available now.