Spinning in Circles
Shutter Island (2010)
Shutter Island has the peculiar, sort of impersonal intensity of the other Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio collaborations. In Gangs of New York, you sensed you were watching a dwarfed good movie, a movie somehow lost in the delivery process. In The Aviator, you felt this self-conscious team grappling with a bio that made all of the usual bio moves while hoping to somehow get to something deeper or greater through force of conviction. In The Departed, you felt this very self-conscious team grappling with a gangster movie that did the usual gangster movie things, while hoping to get to something greater through overwhelming force of conviction.
In Shutter Island – guess what – you sense a very talented, hugely self-conscious team trying to do the usual horror movie things, while hoping to somehow go further. Scorsese has always been one to wallow: the difference between the classic Scorsese movies and his less-respected movies with DiCaprio is the focus of obsession: Scorsese’s early pictures were raw and masterly somehow at once: the work of a movie-maven using movies as a path to catharsis (as opposed to most movie-obsessed directors these days who just recycle others’ catharsis). In the DiCaprio movies, Scorsese has become another movie-recycler, of an admittedly extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship. The new Scorsese movies aren’t forgettable, but the obsessions are hollow and the bludgeoning a little silly considering most of the subject matter, the new pictures, unlike appealing Scorsese genre sketches like After Hours or The Color of Money, are too concerned with turning genre clichés into cleansing art. This aim isn’t impossible (Scorsese largely managed it himself in his Cape Fear) but this pursuit is more likely to leave you with clichés that are neither revealing nor fun, just self-conscious of the notes that haven’t been hit.
I enjoyed Shutter Island on its terms, and it’s probably the best of the Scorsese/DiCaprio movies, but it’s the terms themselves that are disappointing: the manufactured intensity begins to strangle the picture early on. The first thirty minutes are chilling, and the first five minutes – which have DiCaprio’s U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) exchanging pared, hard pleasantries on a boat headed for Shutter Island – are just about perfect. In these moments, you savor Scorsese’s control and knowledge of older horror movie mood: Shutter Island is fake in just the way you want it to be: with gloriously photogenic movie fog, pleasurably obvious foreshadowing and a tangibly damp sense of doom.
The problem is that, in his drive to make the best horror movie of all time, Scorsese finds himself playing a spruced up version of the kind of hyperbole game that you expect from hacks. Every room in the creaky insane asylum is art-directed to the hills (they could be investigating either a haunted carnival or a wax museum, both of which would be appropriate considering Scorsese’s 1940s noir/horror influences) with every actor (and they are all, of course, sticking-out-like-a-sore-thumb character actors) chewing his or her bad dialogue like an especially hard to swallow piece of taffy. Every scene, once the mystery gets properly rolling, is overlong by at least a third, with certain notable guest appearances that could have been cut entirely: Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson’s interludes of impenetrable exposition tell us no more than Ben Kingsley’s similar interludes of impenetrable exposition; the difference, though, is that Kingsley is a brilliant jokester aware of his gifts and of the movie with which he currently finds himself occupying; Hayley and Clarkson are in the more modern, heavier, more-is-more-when-its-actually-less school.
Shutter Island is the kind of bloated auteur picture so rife with intended significance that you find yourself thirsty for those bits and pieces of spontaneity and common sense. Kingsley’s performance is a sly bit of parody that’s still spooky, and Ruffalo, getting good again, emotionally anchors the picture. DiCaprio is effective, and he has a blunt yearning to be a great actor that gets to you from role to role, but I wonder if the picture might’ve worked better with Ruffalo in the lead. DiCaprio and Scorsese fit too well together: they’re both insecure and both too conscious of trying to hammer familiar beats into profundity, while Ruffalo’s effortless charisma suggests life apart from thousands of movies – his nod at the end of the picture, and you’ll know it when you see it, speaks louder than DiCaprio’s frenzies. DiCaprio has a few heartbreaking moments near the end that he nails, but you’re never not conscious of him as an actor “nailing” those moments. Ruffalo might’ve found a more original emotional current in the picture’s darkest turns, he might’ve understood that the most devastating reaction (and this picture piles on every imaginable atrocity – with particularly false, showy flashbacks to a concentration camp, which feature a tracking shot present for no other reason than to identify Scorsese as the director) might’ve been no reaction – a spiritual constipation that would lead to changes in Teddy that, with DiCaprio, we don’t believe other than for their necessity to get to the ending.
Yet, I want to see the movie again. DiCaprio’s commitment, his nakedness, is inspiring (the older he gets the odder he looks, a little like a prettier Cagney, I mean that as a compliment), and Scorsese’s formal control of the medium is still awe-inspiring: Shutter Island is one of the most beautiful horror movies in decades, even if it is essentially pointless (those trying to connect DiCaprio’s self-loathing with the demons of classic Scorsese protagonists are reaching).
A few other rootless observations: Michelle Williams, as Dicaprio’s wife in flashbacks, has a malevolence bathed in a contradictorily gold nostalgia that’s haunting, particularly in the first flashback, which finds her crumbling to ash in his arms – brutal shorthand for those we adore who hurt us anyway. The score, an assemblage of classical selections, is as astute as you’d hope from Scorsese, if anyone here had aimed for fun or coherence they might’ve had something. Despite the brilliant, expensive pageantry, you can’t help but wonder if a director like Stuart Gordon would’ve gotten further with ten bucks, a gallon of paint, and maybe Mena Suvari.
