SPOILER ALERT
If any other film director had made SHUTTER ISLAND -- except maybe a couple, whom I will get to – I would have hated it. As is, it’s merely a joke on the audience, a Rembrandt’s version of “Dog’s Playing Poker,” masterfully-conceived crap, but crap nonetheless.
I didn’t hate this film, which has enough to admire by way of photography and directorial smirks that you wanna pull up a stool next to Scorsese and say convivially, ‘hey, look Marty, loved that shot, but the story’s a KLUNKER!’ Some particular moments stand out: the tracking shot behind the Nazi firing-squad victims is artful and dynamic – captures almost everything about INGLORIOUS BASTERDS in one snow-bright, grotesque shot. Or Michelle Williams, who is just so unbelievable beautiful it’s almost funny to think that she was “the one who looked like a manatee” on Dawson’s Creek while the world pined for Katie Holmes. But we so much younger then.
But even perfectly cooked stool is gonna taste like shit, and thus is the case with SHUTTER ISLAND – all the director’s touches in the world can’t seem to lift it above the schlocky source material. Can we blame Scorsese for this? At first I thought no, we couldn’t – maybe he wrung every single original idea out of this particular wet sponge – but the more I think about it the more I believe that, as in THE AVIATOR, our top-of-the-class director may be a bit too convinced of his own status as FILMMAKER, that the filmmaking tends to come second.
Actually, maybe not top-of-the-class, because Scorsese to me was always like the workhorse salutatorian in the high-school graduating class of important modern directors. Forever immersed and dedicated in his work, yet somehow never matching the natural brilliance, effortless arrogance, and total control of Stanley Kubrick as valedictorian. And surely SHUTTER ISLAND is as much of a love-letter to Kubrick as it is a cry of look at me, I can do that too – but, at least here, Scorsese proves he can’t. Kubrick took some of the worst source material in history (have you ever read “The Shining”? I wish I hadn’t) and made what I pretty comfortably can call my favorite movie of all time. SHUTTER, for all it’s well-lit dream sequences and tricky photography, is persistently ridiculous.
And worse—it’s boring. Look, we all knew what we were going into with this potboiler, it takes place at a G-D insane asylum after all, and we all saw the patently absurd trailer with its Trichotillomanic old crazy woman who lifts her finger to her lips for a gothic and hackneyed SHHHHH. I wasn’t expecting subtlety here. But I was expecting at least a plot twist beyond that Leo DiCaprio was crazy. NO FUCKING SHIT? I actually laughed out loud when the movie revealed this fact as if it was news to anyone. Every thing about this film not only suggests but beats you over the head with the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character (Teddy Daniels) is really the crazy one – and as far as the film’s own syllogism yes this makes sense. But without the deep characterization of the novel, and having to rely on individual visual moments to construct Leo’s character, we have here the same problem Leo had in THE BEACH – an incredibly dense character from the novel is sort of scrubbed away by the postures the filmic version has to adopt. He’s a fine actor, totally reliably good in all his films, but here the role is so dried up that he has no hope. No hope at all.
It’s a content problem, for sure. But when Kubrick had a content problem with THE SHINING he mined his own psychological reaction to the source and expounded on his emotional world visually. That’s how we got the blood-deluge elevators, or the offbeat scene with the ghost party-goer giving head to the man in the disfigured bear costume (maybe Kubrick’s most crazy and brilliant contribution in any of his films). Sure some of the dream sequences here are striking and creative (I love the snow of ash), but Scorsese doesn’t seem to have the Freudian wit and dexterousness command of manifest/latent dream content that Kubrick does. It comes off as derivative. Not just of Kubrick but of DePalma (CAPE FEAR, a much better film, is a loving DePalma homage; SHUTTER reeks of something less deferent) and of course of the man himself, Alfred Hitchcock. The final lighthouse scene, with it vertiginous spiral staircase, drives the point home. Scorsese is one the few legendary directors, and we are lucky that he is making films in our lifetime, but two vitally important lessons are to be learned here. The first lesson is one I think Kubrick, back since GANGS OF NEW YORK, is still trying to work his way around: the act of reminding us of something’s greatness does not a great thing make. Secondly, if you are paying homage to a work of art in a work of art, you best be sure your work is worthy of the reference—is indeed better than the sum of it’s parts. Otherwise we’ll just be longing for the original. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
But I’ll give Scorsese his credit, do not get me wrong. After a preposterous segment with Daniels scaling cliffs and finding hallucinations/women in nightgowns living in caves – he climbs back up to the mainland to find a uniformed man (is he a Nazi ghost; is he an institutional guard?) in a jeep, ready to bring him back to the doctors in charge. They have a very stilted, very-Kubrickian conversation, the likes of which doesn’t really appear in the rest of the film. It’s about the nature of good versus evil, the dark heart of man, all that jazz. You don’t know me, Daniels insists. I’ve known you for centuries, the officer shoots back, almost illogically. CENTURIES. Not days (which, according to the surface narrative, is the case). Not years (which, according to the “reality” revealed later in the film, is how long DiCaprio has been locked up), but centuries. This of course is almost a direct homage to the brilliant scene in THE SHINING when Jack Nicholson is talking to the ghost of the groundskeeper who supposedly went crazy and killed his wife and daughters (“no sir, YOU are the caretaker. You have ALWAYS BEEN the caretaker.”) Centuries of evil co-existing with, often overcoming, good. I really liked this, I thought ‘ol Marty was ADDING SOMETHING here and not just shooting crap in the best possible lighting. I just wish SHUTTER ISLAND had more of this, more subtext, more breathless weirdness.
So I’m glad that this is starting out as an OLD HOLLYWOOD year (I ’m yet to see Polansky’s film but I have high hopes) because 2009 was a young Hollywood year and personally filmmakers like Ivan Reitman leave a bad taste in my mouth. And SHUTTER ISLAND, far from good, isn’t the abortion that some other classic directors have swept under the plush carpets of their career: Robert Altman’s POPEYE (I know some would argue otherwise) or Spielberg’s THE LOST WORLD (yes, check your imdb’s, he did in fact direct it). If I’m going to be bored by a film, there’s a lot worse than Marty’s well-shot, well-scored offering here. Faint praise maybe, but it is what it is.
