Gray Area

"You didn't mean to kill Happ any more than I meant to kill Kaye" says Walter Finch to Detective Dormer.

In a movie with unswerving focus, we are introduced to a man who is losing just that. Detective Will Dormer is dealing with guilt. So fierce is this man's self-torment that he cannot sleep. Ironically, his last name sounds very much like the word "dormir" which is spanish for "to sleep".

A seventeen year old girl named Kaye Connell has been beaten to death and dropped at a landfill. Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and his partner Happ Eckhart are Los Angeles detectives who have been asked to come to Nightmute Alaska to help solve the case. They are introduced to Detective Ellie Burr (Hillary Swank), a young police woman who looks up to Dormer. We soon learn that it is summer in Nightmute, and this far north, the sun never sets.

On the trail of the killer, the detectives find themselves in a foot chase through the fog. The jittery Will Dormer ends up shooting his partner, Detective Eckhart. Was this a mistake? Was it intentional? We learn early on that Detective Dormer and his partner were under investigation by internal affairs back in Los Angeles and Detective Eckhart was planning on cutting a deal to be absolved of involvement. Yet, it was foggy, and Dormer seems truly broken up about having killed his partner. He remains sleepless.

Is it the never-setting sunlight that keeps Will awake or the guilt of having killed his partner? We are asked to ponder this question for a majority of the film. We watch him get more and more delirious, begin to see things and remember flashes of his history (not the good ones either).

His other tormentor is his chief suspect in the Kaye Connell murder case. He has been calling Will, and he says he saw Dormer kill his partner. This forces Will to keep pieces of information from his fellow investigators in an attempt to make them think that Kaye's murderer also shot Happ Eckhart.

This is where the story begins to become a dichotomy. Two characters are now the focus of the story. The sleepless Will, and the also sleepless Walter Finch (Robin Williams), the novelist who killed Kaye Connell. Finch claims that the murder of Kaye was accidental and tries to get Will to stop chasing him and help him pin the murder on someone else.

We see two men who are guilty of killing someone. One who handles it with clarity, but without self judgement, the other, who is unclear as to what happened, but whose conscience torments him. Dormer has lost his way. His life has spiraled from the straight and narrow to one indiscretion, and then to deception in order to cover his actions.

At this point, it doesn't quite matter if Will did or did not intend to kill his partner, he is breaking the law at every turn to cover himself for his actions; some of which preceed his arrival in Nightmute.

During all of this, Detective Ellie Burr is investigating the death of Will's partner and has encountered evidence that hints at Dormer's guilt. Will she turn him in or will she indulge one small indiscretion to cover up for her hero?

This was an enormously satisfying film; as well written as it was directed. The exposition and dialog of this film are just as entertaining as a the chase across floating logs that punctuates the movie. Chris Nolan of "Memento" fame sets the stage of this film against a gray haze. In fact, this could easily have been a black and white film but for the hints of yellow and blue. The gray haze is the perfect visual representation of the gray area that the film discusses. The lack of any real darkness seems to enforce the main theme of the movie; that it is in the gray area, the "small stuff" as Dormer puts it, that darkness truly exists. The sins of the daytime that we only barely hide are more dangerous than those things our consciences shame. They will only lead us to more evils.