SHUTTER ISLAND : [5/10] : Martin Scorsese : US 10* : 138m : {14/28}

Published on: March 21st, 2010

Overcooked, overlong psychological thriller is yet another late-career disappointment from Martin Scorsese – of his narrative features since 2000, only The Aviator comes close to justifying his supposed status as The World’s Greatest Living Film Director.
   For the fourth consecutive time, he’s working with The Aviator‘s leading man Leonardo DiCaprio – other actors are available in Hollywood, apparently.  This time DiCaprio is cast as a federal marshal investigating mysterious goings-on at a remote mental hospital – it’s located on a particularly stormswept island in a corner Boston Harbor  - in 1954.
   Scriptwriter Laeta Kalogridis, adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel,  clunkily drops in all manner of weighty contemporary topics – McCarthyism, the H-Bomb, the shadow of World War II, experimental psychiatry – but this is essentially a rather daft potboiler of a movie, self-consciously old-fashioned in its execution (it’s portentously shot, scored and edited)  and unashamedly self-indulgent in its hommages to noir, drama and horror classics of the 1930s-60s.
   Because the picture, punctuated with lengthy dream-sequences and hallucinations, deals with  issues of perception and  unreliable reality, Scorsese is able to get away with all manner of flubs (from Max Von Sydow’s very Swedish-sounding “German” accent to a supposedly “dead”  child  visibly shivering and breathing) which would otherwise lead to castigation.  We’re in  ’anything-goes’ territory here – as Robert Frost remarked about  free verse,  it’s all a bit like “playing tennis with the net down.”
   Intermittently channelling the kind of over-the-top grand guignol that worked just fine twenty-odd years ago in  Alan Parker’s  somewhat less self-satisfied Angel Heart (Shutter Island = Angel Heart + The Game + A Beautiful Mind + Shock Corridor), proceedings are  fairly diverting on a scene-by-scene basis. The picture works best as a gallery of character-actors, with Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley and Elias Koteas (it’s presumably a deliberate in-joke that he’s made up to resemble Robert De Niro in Frankenstein) among those making the absolute most of their single-scene extended cameos. But it  turns out to be an awful lot of gong for distinctly underwhelming dinner, dribbling away into daft, rug-pulling implausibility during a bathetic final act.*
   Part of the problem is DiCaprio, who,  back in period duds so soon after  posting a career-best turn in the  decidedly superior Revolutionary Road,  works extremely hard to convince us of the protagonist’s tormented psyche. Rather too hard, in fact – especially in contrast to the droller, much more laid-back work from his co-stars Mark Ruffalo (as his easy-going partner) and Ben Kingsley (as the institution’s  suave-voiced chief shrink, calmly sailing through some of the most preposterous dialogue he’s ever been tasked with mouthing.)
   Shutter Island has survived heavily negative advance word (it was ignominiously yanked from the late-2009 Oscar season) to become Scorsese’s biggest ever money-maker – overtaking 2006′s dire, inexplicably overrated The Departed, which also landed Scorsese with his long-overdue first Oscar for Best Director.  Peer esteem and public acclaim – a heady combination, and given his track record  few would begrudge Scorsese his current success, especially  given his peerless and superb work in the restoration and preservation of neglected masterpieces.
But surely he must realise how far short he’s falling right now when it comes to his  new releases – in comparison not only with  Scorsese’s influences and antecedents, but also his own greatest hits. Or is he perhaps  trapped in an ongoing  delusion,  one fostered and maintained by his fans, collaborators and admirers? “Look, there’s Marty Scorsese – the world’s greatest film director. And look, he’s with Jake La Motta – the world’s greatest boxer!”

Neil Young
22nd/23rd March, 2010

* Do stick around for the closing credits, however, which are accompanied Max Richter’s rather terrific, genuinely eerie adaptation of Dinah Washington’s 1960 classic torch-song This Bitter Earth (its presence here presumably a nod to Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep [1977], in which it figures particularly prominently.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxRp3pqwgo
Also, check out the amusingly pretentious titles of the instrumental tracks used, which include Uaxuctum: The Legend Of The Mayan City Which They Themselves Destroyed For Religious Reasons.

Neil Young's Film Lounge

SHUTTER ISLAND : [5/10] : Martin Scorsese : US 10* : 138m : {14/28}