Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Mark Ruffalo
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 140 mins
Genre: Drama/Thriller/Horror/Noir
Country: USA
Say what you will about Martin Scorsese. There's a very few Hollywood filmmakers today that could wring out an impressive CV laminated with solid, credible auteurist works that treads the fine balance between popular cinema and contemporary film art, boasting a canon loaded with signature cinematic specimens of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Raging Bull. He may have won an Oscar for directing The Departed, but it wasn't his best film. Now, with a statuette under his belt, he could have gone and made a Hollywood crowd-pleaser and perhaps gather more gongs. But he didn't. Instead he made Shutter Island, and went all Powell and Pressburger on us - and there's barely any other film in recent memory that potentially divide audiences sharply in the middle. Either you like it, or you don't.
For the cinematically uninitiated, any fairweather moviegoer who practically knows little about film noir, Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger are very likely to appreciate Shutter Island less, as Scorcese packs a chock-full of filmic references that in most frame compositions, it would send a film-fan with an OCD flying though film books for a fevered scrutiny. That Shutter Island, adapted from Dennis 'Mystic River' Lehane's novel, shares an identifiable DNA with Hitchcock's Vertigo - a noirish, sombre tale of a detective set to investigate a crime. In Vertigo, James Stewart's protagonists seeks to solve the identity of a woman, and in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio's Federal Marsall Teddy Daniels lands on the eponymous island to investigate a missing woman, a patient in an American correctional asylum where this film entirely takes place. It also happens that both narrative threads implode on its two central characters. Noir, meanwhile, is the underlying theme here, with DiCaprio and Ruffalo's sidekick Chuck donning 1950's noir trilby hats, Philip Marlowe cloaks and Humphrey Bogart cynicism. Crucial to the proceedings is also the genre's prototype, the unreliable narrator, which serves significant to the final twist.
Which leads us to the story. If it weren't too self-conscious, Shutter Island could have fully engorged on its audiences. This doesn't mean it's an inferior film. Teddy's odyssey into the dark depths of the asylum, encountering eccentric and intriguing mental-hospital doctors played to oily perfection by Sir Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, is gripping stuff, working best as a mutual engagement between noir-thriller and loony-bin horror. We descend further into the labyrinthine mystery surrounding the island, walking through Gothic hospital corridors, dark underground prison cells, and sends us into the tall vertiginous cliffs towering over lashing waves below - scenes so marvellously framed and lit that could make Scorsese's idols Powell and Pressburger proud. Yet the steady narrative flow is occasionally broken by unsubtle flashbacks of Teddy's haunted WWII past and his dead wife (Michelle Williams), scenes so overly saturated and stilted, where the film's central problem lies. There is a final twist that isn't so much M. Night Shyamalan as Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, a denouement that both frustrates and sends minds reeling with incomprehension. This is not a critique to the 'twist', but rather the execution to the finale, which transports the narrative into flashback again that could have fared better with exposition. Nevertheless, minds are warped here, so who are we going to believe?
This might be far from a masterpiece, flawed and ridden with contrived flashbacks, Shutter Island's material is nonetheless a perfect fit for Scorcese - a tough-edged potboiler with a noir-thriller Hitchcockian undertow. Cinematically, it's impressively assembled it could make film gods proud.
Review by The Moviejerk © Janz
