Fran?ois Truffaut, cinema's poet of childhood, wrote criticism that boiled with hatred. He called the French director Claude Autant-Lara, "a butcher who insists on trying to make lace." He wrote to Jean-Luc Godard: "you're a shit on a pedestal." We are so used to the idea that criticism is a fine thing, a dissection to reveal nuance, that it's hard to see how hurling a brick through the movie screen can be other than blunt and embarrassing. Yet Truffaut's critical essays and letters are among the glories of film prose.
I thought of Fran?ois Truffaut as I endured the new Al Pacino film Insomnia, which went to number one in the British box office and got rave reviews. People love this film and I hated it. This often happens, and there can be narcissism in stealing away from the crowd. I don't like raining on people's parade. But there's something about hating an art form you love which is exhilarating.
All the signs were that this would be a splendid example of new intelligent Hollywood. British director Christopher Nolan's previous film, Memento, had virtually reinvented storytelling. Insomnia was a remake of a 1997 Norwegian film which, while impressive, left much to explore. I had been primed for the screening by a long, revealing interview with Nolan at this year's Edinburgh Film Festival. That evening was the gala premiere and Nolan introduced the film. The lights went down; credits of seeping blood; an opening CinemaScope shot drifting over glaciers, and...
Fustiness; touches of the big blandness of David Lean films; Hollywood's god's eye view that precludes any real poetics of place. Pacino arrives in Alaska. He's a great, intuitive, LA cop. Hilary Swank is a beaming local policewoman and fan of Pacino's reputation. Man and woman; grizzled and fresh-faced; city and wilderness-cinematically illiterate oppositions, signposted in Hollywood's vulgar way. Then there's the deadening, determinist story arc: he will turn out to be a phoney and she will be the one to discover it. A girl has been killed; Pacino investigates; I begin to boil.
As the crude thematic prologue was followed by a daisy chain of B-movie plot implausibilities, Truffaut came to mind. Pacino visits the deceased's house and discovers a photograph torn in two sitting near the top of her waste bin. Excuse me? Hadn't the local police already searched this room? Here was the actor who gave us Michael Corleone and Dog Day Afternoon doing Charlie Chan stuff. The Guardian review called Insomnia: "The Big Sleep for a new generation."
Maybe the Truffaut trigger came a little later, when Pacino levers up a floorboard in his hotel room to hide a gun underneath. Or was it when he has to find out where the murderer's summer home is? He goes to his winter house and finds that the dust jacket of one of his novels helpfully mentions where the summer place is. A bunch of letters with the full address of the summer hideaway are sitting prominently on a nearby table.
Insomnia is full of stuff like this and my reaction was so intemperate that my complaint should really end here. Alas, hatred cannot be contained, it runs away at the mouth. Mention must be made of the film's sense of place, its portrait of Alaska. John Sayles's Limbo is set in a similar fishing community, where stocks have been depleted. He uses the first 20 minutes of his film to sketch the layers of that place, who its people are, where they come from, how they relate to the landscape. These social and existential questions anchor Limbo. In Insomnia, we do a lot more fly-overs of glaciers and valleys. Didn't it look great? No! Like Truffaut, I care too much about movies to know what that question means. Would we say the same about a painting-didn't it look great?
Then there is Insomnia's symbolism. Like Hank Quinlan in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, there is a crime in Pacino's past. A moral voice is keeping him awake. In the constant daylight of Alaska, he cannot hide from his history and from the fact that he shot his partner here and lied about it. This symbolic scaffold is taken straight from the Norwegian original, without re-engaging it. Pacino's morally dark LA experiences are contrasted with Alaska's penetrating spiritual light (Scandinavians such as Carl Theodor Dreyer used this idea more than half a century ago) in a way that, since no reality about Alaska has been explored, is patronising to it and masochistic about LA. Light is too interesting a thing in cinema (or painting) to use it in this miserable way.
The film trowelled on its bad story, its cheap psychology, its detestable, calculated sense of what an audience wants. The hatred I felt at its formlessness and soullessness stirred me. What was its source? Why so intense? In an essay called "What Do Critics Dream About?" Truffaut described how in 1951 he "flew into a rage when Orson Welles had been forced to withdraw his Othello from the Venice film festival competition because, at the insistence of his backers, he wasn't allowed to risk losing to the British super production of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet." Truffaut raged because he loved cinema; and this was, for him, "a lovely time of life-when one cares more about the fate of those we admire than about one's own." He wasn't defending himself. He was defending film.
