Shutter Island (DVD)

This is a FILM ONLY review.

Summary

Year of Production: 2010
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screen writer: Laeta Kalogridis
Total Running Time: 138 Minutes
UK Certificate: 15
Region 2 DVD Release Date: To Be Confirmed – Currently Still At Cinemas
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVrHkYoY​80

An Accomplished Director

If ever a word were appropriate to describe Martin Scorsese then that word would be ‘legendary’. In a career that has now broken into its fifth decade, much of Scorsese’s work will appear in those ‘all time top 10’ movie lists that we’re all so fond of. The 21 motion pictures directed by Scorsese have, between them, picked up more than 60 Oscar nominations, 15 Oscar wins and similar numbers of Golden Globe awards. Scorsese’s output over the last forty or so years has been consistently excellent. He generally only releases a film every two or three years, but, almost without exception, he surprises and delights both fans and critics, either by returning to genres that he knows intimately or by trying his hand at something new.

Scorsese’s directorial trademarks are oft-imitated but seldom bettered and rarely used quite as effectively. Effects that distort the audience’s view of what’s happening often appear in Scorsese’s movies; things like slow motion and freeze frame capture key moments in the narrative. Scorsese knows how to use this technique to frame only the most appropriate moments in the plot, whereas other directors are more wasteful and have pushed these techniques towards far more gimmicky output. An eminent film historian, Scorsese happily weaves genres together, combining the visual styles and content of westerns with those of film noir for example and his love of moving pictures is evident throughout every moment of one of his movies. A passionate and loyal New Yorker, his films reflect the values and issues that he has seen during his life in the city, from the lives of Italian Americans in the city through to the crime and violence that exists on every street.

He has proven himself to be extremely versatile. Period crime dramas like Goodfellas set the benchmark against which other directors would be measured, whereas biting social dramas such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull show an insight into the human condition that few other directors have mastered. It wasn’t until 2006 that Scorsese finally won an Academy Award for best director, with his remake crime thriller The Departed, which is an astounding oversight when you consider just how influential some of his movies have been. For Shutter Island, Scorsese moves into the territory of a psychological thriller, last attempted in 1991 when he remade the 1960s classic Cape Fear. The film is based on a 2003 novel of the same name, by author Dennis Lehane. Lehane’s work is not new to cinema audiences. Clint Eastwood brought Lehane’s novel Mystic River to the screen in 2003 and Ben Affleck directed the screen adaptation of his novel Gone Baby Gone in 2007, both to strong critical acclaim.

Plot Synopsis

It is the 1950s. Two U.S. marshals travel to a notorious hospital for the criminally insane. Surrounded entirely by dangerous waters, Shutter Island can only be accessed via one modest dock and as their ship approaches the island, it’s hard for the marshals not to feel a sense of trepidation. Haunted by the recent death of his girlfriend and other more distant traumas, lead Marshal Teddy Daniels focuses on the matter at hand, but is haunted by hallucinations and nightmares.

The marshals’ assignment is a curious one. A dangerous murderess has apparently escaped from her cell on the island. The island’s authorities are at a loss to understand how she did it. With the cell door still locked, it is as though she has simply disappeared. Daniels and his partner Chuck believe there to be a more conventional explanation and set about investigating the staff and inmates who last had contact with the prisoner. But it soon becomes clear that all is not well on Shutter Island. Rumours abound that ‘strange’ things happen in the lonely lighthouse and who knows what evil lurks in the darkness of the high security ward on top of the island..

Multiple Personality Disorder

There are very few popular directors or writers who can capably handle a psychological thriller. Stephen King has tried (and failed) many times, losing his way significantly at various points, as he seems to lose his grip on reality quicker than any of his leading characters. M Night Shyamalan had some early successes, but quickly became obsessed with finding the ultimate denouement, essentially at the expense of everything that came before. In mainstream terms, Shutter Island is a valiant and admirable attempt by Scorsese, capably combining the director’s unmistakable style alongside Kalogridis’s eerie screenplay to create a film that is both visually striking and frequently atmospheric. Exploring both traditional and unconventional surrealism, there’s much to admire here, but like some kind of haunting, supernatural presence there’s just something missing here.

The film opens very well indeed. The immediate sense of foreboding is almost overwhelming, particularly as Marcel Duchamp’s thundering soundtrack threatens to deafen the audience amidst a cacophony of dramatic strings. Like any good thriller, Scorsese sets his mental stall out from the beginning isolating his characters physically and socially in a way that leads the audience to suspect everyone of everything. Shutter Island is essentially a triumph of appearing to be so many things. Within minutes, fans of horror films will have connected with plot elements that have them salivating intently about what is to come, alongside fans of subtler, deeper drama that seeks to explore themes of isolation and evil. This is one of Shutter Island’s greatest achievements. It isn’t that the film appears to have an identity crisis. It’s more that the director simply isn’t prepared to guarantee which way this is going to go.

This will almost certainly divide audiences. The trailers and advertisements seem to promise something more akin to a horror film, which, realistically, this certainly isn’t. Indeed, even as a thriller, there are very few moments in Shutter Island where the audience is likely to jump. Scorsese, you see, plays a rather different psychological game.

Is This A Dream?

Gradually, as the narrative unfolds, so it starts to come apart. The trouble with films dominated by dream sequences and hallucinations is that their aim is normally to unseat the audience, blurring the lines between what’s real and what’s not and generally confusing the hell out of everyone. Scorsese is rather more effective in this than most, purely because the director knows the meaning of the word subtlety. As the narrative treads two seemingly concurrent paths (one real, one not) the audience gradually realises that there is more crossover between the two than they might have considered. As one mystery is apparently solved, two more open up to take its place and intrigue the audience in new directions. Indeed, the mystery of the escaped murderess seems resolved relatively early on in the film, indicating nothing more than the fact that Shutter Island has rather more tricks up its sleeve. Kalogridis just about manages to keep the script the right side of psychological overload, remembering that audiences can only take so much, and so buried within a maze of thoughts and memories, there’s a relatively conventional thriller here, waiting to be solved.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s not entirely predictable, because, fundamentally it is. Realistically, the storyline yields enough small surprises not to be labelled as ‘obvious’ but the film’s much-hyped ‘uber-twist’ is really very predictable. There are very obvious hints and clues almost from the outset, and unlike other films where the significance of such events only really becomes evident with the benefit of hindsight a shrewd audience member will spot this one coming a mile off. Indeed, any suggestion of newly found hindsight actually draws the audience into a conversation about things that didn’t therefore add up, rather than a startling realisation of new significance. Overall, it has to be argued that Scorsese rather over-did the flashbacks and dream sequences here. He fails to convince the audience that they are (initially) watching something conventional and reveals almost straight away the significance of the film’s more surreal plot elements. Summarily, Scorsese made the film just a bit ‘too’ insane. Many viewers will find the sudden changes in pace and style overwhelming; others will find them irritating. I was somewhere in between.

Such Things To See

Not surprisingly, this is still a visually stunning film, in a number of different ways. Scorses’s camera seems to be everywhere, looking up from moving vehicles to gauge perspective and size, creeping around stairways and corridors to create tension and focusing on eyes and mouths when at its most thoughtful. For directorial style alone, the film almost certainly deserves the praise lavished upon it. In an isolated chapel, Scorsese introduces traditional touches of gothic horror, flashing around gargoyles illuminated by lightning and crashing thunder that threatens to envelope everything. In the dark, damp walkways of the infamous Block C, Scorsese’s visuals inspire terror, a fear of the unknown, am overwhelming trepidation of what’s to come. Yet alongside these dominant, bombastic visual styles, Scorsese somehow manages to conjure up the subtlest of images. A lone cigarette abandoned on a cliff edge gives off a faint trail of smoke, like some kind of eerie finger pointing and, indeed, when Daniels is at his lowest ebb, smoke from his cigarette seems to turn tail and return into Daniels’ body, as though reality itself is turning on its head.

The island is competently re-created, although some of the special effects are a little obvious. The brutal presence of ward C, for example, seems rather obviously artificial in comparison to some of the other buildings used and feels at odds with the general look of the island. The coastal scenes are well imagined, with Robert Richardson’s cinematography amply demonstrating the danger and isolation of the rocks that surround the island. Generally, the director avoids some of the obvious cliché of a film set in a lunatic asylum and, in fairness, many of the features that feel clichéd were almost certainly appropriate to the era. The former Medfield State Hospital (previously a real lunatic asylum, now closed) was used for much of the location filming, which adds an obvious element of realism but occasionally, Scorsese's style doesn’t feel quite as original as it should. Daniels’ arrival in ward C, for example, feels a little like the infamous Clarice/Lecter introduction in Silence of the Lambs both physically and emotionally. Where the film does succeed, of course, is turning perception on its head. It’s inevitable that we’d expect something strange to be going on in a lunatic asylum, and we’d be fundamentally correct, even if it’s not quite in the way we might have predicted.

Regardless of whether there are too many of them or not, the dream sequences are simply stunning. Whilst they feature nothing that ‘couldn’t’ be happening or couldn’t have happened, they are all created in a surrealistic combination of pace and colour that draws the audience to question everything. It is here that Shutter Island is almost certainly at its most disturbing. Daniels’ military experiences of liberating Nazi concentration camps conjure up harrowing images of death and cruelty. There’s an incredibly artful image of the bodies of a small Jewish girl and her mother, frozen together in the depths of winter in an eternal embrace that is as serene as it is disturbing. Scorsese uses these moments to great effect. We truly understand what it is that haunts Marshall Daniels. At least, we think we do, anyway.

Who Are You?

Clocking up a fourth collaboration with Scorsese, DiCaprio cements his position as the director’s new protégé. DiCaprio is a versatile enough actor and seems best equipped to deal with multi-dimensional (or should that be disturbed) characters, as he did in The Beach and The Departed. As Teddy Daniels, DiCaprio is certainly convincing, even if he’s not an immediately obvious choice for a role like this. But the actor has his limits, and Shutter Island demands more than it gets. I’m not convinced that DiCaprio is yet able to shed the limitations of looking younger than he is and Scorsese’s attraction to the actor seems to revolve entirely around increasingly close up images of his eyes. Despite the raw, often harrowing subject matter here, DiCaprio simply doesn’t inspire the audience to care about him, which greatly limits the film’s emotional impact. It’s not that we particularly dislike Teddy Daniels. We just don’t really feel anything for him, which derails the film’s emotional conclusion almost entirely.

Indeed, for me at least, it’s Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the head psychiatrist Dr Cawley. Kingsley’s restrained disposition comes into its own, with a calm, knowing performance that completely fits the bill. Straying well away from the caricature of the mad scientist, there’s still something you can’t quite put your finger on here and that is, of course, the whole point. Curiously, Kingsley’s character is rather more likeable than the lead. Mark Ruffalo’s support as Daniel’s partner, Chuck, is an understated number. Chuck is desperate not to stand out and, in this, Ruffalo succeeds completely, either by design or by default. There’s an interesting appearance from British actress Emily Mortimer, whose classic features seem a little out of place, but she’s certainly passionate and committed. Max Von Sydow also crops up as a rather more sinister doctor, which, realistically, isn’t a stretch.

What The Critics Say

Total Film magazine rates the film highly at four stars, saying:

Resembling a psychotropic reverie or unhinged fever dream, this finds Scorsese at his most technically accomplished. Some may find it emotionally distant and cold to the touch, yet that’s no slight on its superb construction and fine ensemble cast.

Time Out London gave the film three stars saying:

As senseless, perverse and unwieldy as it undoubtedly is, Shutter Island might be Scorsese’s most enjoyable film in a decade.

www.rottentomatoes.com gives the film a good score of 67%. The consensus is:

It may not rank with Scorsese’s best work but Shutter Island’s gleefully unapologetic genre thrills represent the director at his most unrestrained.

What I Say

This is a mixed bag for sure. Visually, it’s up there with Scorsese’s finest. The island is atmospheric and strikingly recreated and it’s hard not to admire Scorsese’s accomplished camerawork. But the narrative is wholly unsatisfying. Even if a viewer didn’t find the outcome rather easy to spot, there’s a real lack of any emotional resonance here, which the subject matter rather relies on. Compared to others in the genre, this lacks that conclusive punch. Compare and contrast to the jolt that hits the audience at the climax of The Sixth Sense, or the punch in the guts that comes at the end of Se7en and it’s not hard to see why audiences are leaving cinemas confused. Despite its rather disquieting revelations, Shutter Island somehow manages neither to jolt nor punch.

Fans of Scorsese should (and almost certainly will) see this, even if it’s just on the grounds of completeness. For everyone else, it’s more of a gamble, but probably just about worth the risk.