I have always felt that film is the art of screenwriters and directors. One tells the story, portrays the characters, and the other puts all the details together. If we use fashion as an analogy, the screenwriter is a designer and the director is a good tailor, then what is an actor? The actor is a model, a clothes rack. I have never felt that it is not worth investing too much in the modeling career, because it is a career where talent is higher than hard work. I don't have much respect for all similar professions, sorry.
For actors, all they can do is to complete the director's intention. Although actors are more playable than models, they are basically framed within a very small range. So I take Hitchcock's famous quote, "Actors are beasts. I'm not saying actors are beasts, I mean, they should be treated like beasts."
But this "Insomnia" slapped me hard because of Al Pacino's performance. It's really hard for me to comment on Al Pacino's performance in the movie. Why? I have no experience with insomnia, but all my imagination of insomnia is not as rich as Al Pacino's performance. For me, the "fabrication" in my brain is not more imaginative than another person's physical manifestation, which is really rare. In my opinion, Al Pacino's "Insomnia" is no longer a performance, but an irrefutable and undisputed fact. How can you judge an objective reality? is it good? it's bad? It's useless, it's there, whether you like it or hate it, it's just there, it doesn't care about the insignificant thoughts in your heart.
Perhaps Al Pacino's performance in this film wasn't the most impressive thing he made. But for The Godfather, Hot Day Afternoon, and even the Devil's Advocate, their scripts are good enough to give the actors a long pole to jump higher if they just "punch hard." But on the other hand, it's not that the worse the script, the better the actor. It's like a pearl in a handful of sand. Beauty is beautiful, but it's not natural at all. The script of "Insomnia" is so simple that it is a bit rudimentary. It just tells a case in its entirety, and that's it. Such a bland story just brings out the value of "truth". We may never encounter the mafia in our lives, nor rob a bank to make our partner change gender, but we endure physical smallness almost every day. The suffering of small discomfort, beware of my friends or business partners suddenly turning against each other, struggling in the gully of sacrificing others and protecting myself. What Al Pacino does is step on these usual worries and take it a step further. It was this step that changed everything, turning an ordinary citizen into a lunatic, a liar, and a murderer. What Al Pacino does is take what happens to our minds 100,000 times a day and actually turn it into reality, and then tell us the consequences that you haven't seen, that's what it looks like. His performance convinced me so much that the truth would follow the path outlined in the film.
Yes, this film also has the strange scenery of Alaska, as well as a special disease (insomnia), as well as Williams, Swank actor and actress level "but not lost" performances, as well as Al Pacino and William The tension between Sri Lanka and the wonderful rivalry, but to me, these are not the point. In everyone's life, there are some unknown atrocities and lies that once hovered on the edge of morality. They are facts and we cannot avoid them. What we can do is not to let it all add up. Even the smallest evil will have uncontrollable catastrophic consequences due to a hundred repetitions. At that time, the price to be paid will probably only be in life.
View more about Insomnia reviews
