Shutter Island

By Daniel Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter

The trailer for Martin Scorseses’ “Shutter Island” comes across like a horror film, and a chilling one at that. But when the release date was changed from late October to last week, rumours suggested the project was having an identity crisis.

It was also assumed that the master’s 21st feature was less than Oscar material, and that it would suffer in comparison to the weightier features distributors slot for the fall, when they’re more likely to be considered for year end awards.

Paramount was smart, not because “Shutter Island” is lesser Scorsese, although it is, but because it’s an oversized B movie that makes no attempt to conceal its origins. Now, amidst the mediocre Valentine’s Day slush and spineless action films currently showing, it’s a stand out.

The distributor was smart because it ruled its’ first weekend, giving Scorsese the biggest opening of his career. Apparently the trailer worked. Still, it’s misleading because the movie is more of a super sized film noir than a big budget scare fest. In fact there isn’t a “boo” moment in its entire 2 hours and 18 minutes. So it’s a tad deceptive, although the real problems have more to do with an overstuffed production, which is disproportionate to the scripts cagey but context bound ambitions.

Teddy Daniels, (Leonardo De Caprio) a federal law officer, arrives on an island asylum for the criminally insane to find out how one of the inmates/patients disappeared. There are portents of bad things to come from the very beginning, as a gallery of twisted faces and bodies seems to warn him that something’s amiss.

Since this is 1954, psychiatry and its practitioners are, to some extent, alien to working class cops. Shortly after their introductions the resident doctors,(Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow) confound Teddy and his new partner, (Mark Ruffalo) with their ambivalence toward the investigation. Making matters more distressing are Teddy’s frequent flashbacks to his dead wife and nightmares from his war time experiences.

The atmosphere thickens as inmates warn Teddy about cruel and unusual treatments. At the same time the doctors’ waning cooperation mires the investigation in procedure. Then a storm hits, which, in addition to keeping the cops on the island, threatens the survival of the most dangerous patients, who are kept in a maximum security compound swathed in a mystery of its own.

We’ve been here before; a troubled cop, evasive docs, fearful patients crying wolf, flashbacks to a past screaming for cloture. Working from a novel by Dennis Lehane, whose “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby, Gone,” made graceful transitions to the screen, Scorsese brings the bounty of filmmaking resources he’s accumulated over the past 40 years. And it shows in the rich production design and fluid story telling.

But fluid imagery is not coherence, and Laeta Kalogridis’ script has a larger investment in Teddy’s disorientation than the whereabouts of the missing patient. And as more hydra like elements come to bear on Teddy, the more fragmented the movie becomes.

The stylized images, from an almost surreal seascape that opens the picture, to our first look at Teddy’s sweaty and pained expression, to the maze of corridors in a labyrinth like hospital ward, suggest that there’s a lot more trouble here than the disappearance of a patient. All of this is absorbing, if just slightly exaggerated. But then Scorsese, who rises to the challenge of keeping us interested in his ultimate intentions, slowly abandons credibility, just as the threats close in on Teddy and his partner.

Scorese did the same thing in his high power remake of “Cape Fear.” As he pumped more and more sexual tension into the plot line Robert DeNiro’s psychopath and the metaphorical storm at the movie’s conclusion became almost surreally overblown. He doesn’t have to go that far here, because a unifying thread pulls a lot of “Island” together in the last reel, but the same problem intrudes.

The heart of the material, rooted in fifty years of scholcky, B movies, (near and dear to so many movie lovers,) is betrayed by self important production and wearying length, that lead us to expect more. And why shouldn’t we, when Teddy’s recollections of liberating the death camp at Dachau, are as elaborate as anything in “Inglorious Basterds?”

The issue is one of weight. It’s not a matter of where we’re directed to place our emotions, because that’s clearly on Teddy, but rather where we are to place our attention. There’s just too much information and too many directions. The issue is further complicated by fishy, mannered performances from Kingsley and Von Sydow, although they’re not entirely to blame; ham fisted dialogue handicaps their credibility the moment they open their mouths. This is intentional, no doubt, as Scorcese is too much of a movie scholar, and an artist, to allow distractions to creep into his movies unintentionally.

Clearly, Scorsese wanted to have fun with the trappings of low budget quickies like Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor,” or facile ironies in Rod Serling’s celebrated “Twilight Zone,” from TV. But most Bs and certainly the TV shows, are short and to the point. At the two hour mark, “Shutter Island” is a bit of a shlog. Characters like Patricia Clarkson’s fugitive therapist, and Ted Levine’s cop, while planted early in the story, make themselves known so late they add more in the way of annoyance than suspense. And yet the movie keeps us amused.

Scorsese has had nothing less than a brilliant career, and we’re entitled to expect more and better films to come. The commercial success of “Shutter Island” will no doubt set him free to follow whatever creative impulse moves him. And at its worst “Shutter Island” is classy entertainment.

So why, finally, is it a bit of a letdown? You can get a clue by looking backwards at several Hitchcock’s, like “Vertigo,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” or “Rear Window;” similarly rigged mind benders. The Hitchcock’s, lighter on the surface, are even dark at their core, and reveal more of that core with repeated viewings. I don’t think the same can be said for “Shutter Island.”

The deepest troubles with “Island” have a lot to do with the subterfuge that clouds the movie’s crucial middle sections. Hitchcock was obsessive about the building blocks of his stories. Even when his running times are close to, or more than two hours, there’s almost nothing that you’d cut for relevance. When we total up the sum of watching them, this amounts to the difference between a fleeting and passionate engagement.

Scorsese has given us a stirring opening and a heartfelt conclusion, but not the obsessively marshalled guts that make the Hitchcock’s so compelling. That’s why one trip to “Shutter Island” may be enough.