|
|
| Thursday, February 18, 2010 01:23 PM |
| On the Viewer - Shutter Island |
 by Fëanor |
(A note: I've tried to mostly avoid spoilers here, but I do speak in general terms about some of the later events of the film, so if you'd prefer to remain totally pure, you might want to skip this review - or at least the end of it - until you've seen the movie for yourself.)
Coming out of this movie, I overheard a couple behind me talking about which scenes had been the scariest, and which ones would keep them awake that night. This wasn't the kind of talk I'd expected to hear leaving a Martin Scorsese film, but there are plenty of parts of Shutter Island that do indeed conform to the genre conventions of the horror/suspense/thriller. In fact, my major complaint with the film is how closely it conforms to conventions and cliches.
The movie is set in 1954, and opens with Leonardo DiCaprio throwing up into a sink. He's playing Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels, a man who doesn't do well on the water, but who finds himself now on a ferry to Shutter Island, a remote hospital for the criminally insane. He is accompanied by his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), and they are investigating the disappearance of one of the asylum's female patients. How she could have disappeared is a true mystery, as Shutter Island is a tiny place, locked down tight, and there's really nowhere to go. The facility is run by Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), who prefers modern, humane treatment techniques, and insists on calling the people under his care "patients" rather than "prisoners," though they are certainly both. Cawley's colleague (or perhaps his boss?) is Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), who seems less interested than Cawley in being humane, and reminds Daniels uncomfortably of traumatic experiences he had in Germany during the war.
It's clear right away that nothing is as it seems here - not the island, not the doctors, not the patients, not the impossible disappearance, not Chuck, not even Teddy. Teddy is haunted by horrific memories of the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, and by eerie dreams of his dead wife. Slowly these dreams and memories and visions begin to intrude on his waking life. Is he being driven insane by this place, by the people here? What is the secret of Shutter Island? And why is Teddy really here? To find a missing patient, to find the man who killed his wife, or to expose a hidden and terrible conspiracy connected to Nazi medical experiments?
The film takes you on a tense, disturbing, and, yes, frightening journey, moving without warning between the present reality; memories of the past; and distorted, nightmarish visions of both. It's hard to keep your footing. Walking through the city streets after I'd left the theater, I felt as if reality had remained malleable and thin; that the people around me might suddenly reveal themselves to be other people entirely; that what I was seeing might tear away to reveal another place entirely.
To put it another way, the movie is atmospheric and effective. The visuals are stunning, the photography beautiful. The camera work and the soundtrack are both a little over the top at times - the music occasionally so booming and dramatic it's ridiculous, the pans occasionally so sudden and violent they make you a bit ill - but they work. The acting is excellent - Scorsese has surrounded himself, as usual, with professionals - and DiCaprio's performance is particularly deep and impressive. His character is proudly blue collar, and seems to relish pronouncing "escape" as "ecscape," repeating the word many times. He's also complex and unpredictable - the riddle at the center of the story.
Like a lot of Scorsese's films, this one is about violence. What is the difference between men of violence and violent men, and which is Teddy? When it comes down to it, aren't we all capable of horrific acts? Teddy's extremely unsettling conversation with the Warden (played with menace and majesty by Ted Levine) is particularly powerful and enlightening in this context. The Warden seems to subscribe to what is almost a religion of violence. Is he right? Is violence just the way of the world?
It's disappointing that after a thoughtful and powerful build-up, with a steady rise in tension and madness, in the end the film simply deflates. At the climax, after a run up the twisting staircase of the lighthouse that reminded me favorably, on various levels, of the end of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Teddy enters a room where Ben Kingsley's character unloads both barrels of an exposition shotgun at him and the audience. In a lengthy dialog scene, he explains away all of the film's mysteries and reveals that at the center of them all is a pretty unimaginative cliche.
But after everything has been carefully explained away, the movie nearly redeems itself with a powerful and subtle conclusion. Teddy tells Chuck, "Being in this place makes me wonder: is it better to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?" The strong suggestion is that he has answered this question for himself, and that he has consciously chosen the fate he's walking toward as the film ends.
So the very end of Shutter Island is quite strong. But the solution to its mystery is clumsily delivered and disappointing, and that hurts the movie a great deal. Still, for most of its length, it's a powerful film full of images and ideas that stick inside you - that haunt you. A strange, flawed little ghost story. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
