Martin Scorsese – Shutter Island
Words: James Emerson
Martin Scorsese has found his new favorite city, at least until his new favorite actor can pronounce his r’s again: Boston and Leonardo DiCaprio return in the noir-drenched Shutter Island after their showings in 2006’s The Departed. Sure, the locale and the actor are parts of another shifting Scorsese obsession—temporarily holding a monomaniacal grip on his mind like the mob once did, or Robert DeNiro, or anything involving Daniel Day-Lewis and the nineteenth century—but Shutter Island at large is evidence of a greater interest of the director, one that informs each of his movies: other movies. This is
not to say it’s derivative or superficially similar to other works: if Shutter Island invites comparison to a Hitchcock flick, it’s not because of rain pouring off fedora brims in an almost monochromatic setting, but because it’s a genuinely good thriller. And it’s not the 20th-century classical soundtrack that evokes The Shining, it’s the tangible dread that you feel in the pit of your stomach as the action almost painfully unrolls. So Shutter Island’s potential place in the pantheon of horror-suspense makes the contrived, overlong finale all the more disappointing.
DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo are U.S. Marshals investigating the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane. To keep the denizens of Boston safe and the movie sufficiently tense and creepy, the hospital is located on a remote island in a storm-ravaged sea. A hurricane delays the marshals’ return to mainland and keeps them longer than expected.
The movie doesn’t substitute frenetic cuts (a la the Bourne series) for actual suspense, but uses a more legitimate repertoire to keep the audience in a stranglehold. Take the soundtrack, for instance, composed mostly of modern classical pieces: its first notes sound as soon as the Paramount logo appears and it doesn’t let up until the credits. The songs, which range from the discordant (“Root of an Unfocus” by John Cage) to the grandly ominous (Krzysztof Penderecki’s Symphony no. 3), might have been melodramatic overkill in another movie, but Shutter Island manages to accommodate them, making for a natural complement to the onscreen action.
That onscreen action is helped carried out by some veterans, including Max van Syndow, Ben Kingsley (the head of the institution), and Ted Levine (a German psychiatrist with—like all German doctors of the 50s—a potentially shady past) in a small but captivating role in which he discourses on the nature of violence. As for the lead: I suppose I should get over Titanic (it’s been thirteen years, after all), but I’m still surprised and amazed that little Leo DiCaprio has grown up to take on Serious, Adult roles. Mr. Scorsese has done well in picking his new partner.
Also worth mention are the visuals. Like Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson did in 1999’s criminally underrated Bringing out the Dead, they superbly capture the inherent weirdness and surreality of dreams—quite an accomplishment when one considers how subjective dreams are, a quality that doesn’t easily lend itself to film. DiCaprio’s first nightmare in the movie is a riot of Technicolor and replete with strange dream-occurrences. Looking for rich, interesting cinematography? 3D cameras need not apply.
The eerie, tense atmosphere of Shutter Island, so meticulously and skillfully constructed from its music, its cinematography, its actors, pervades even an ending that is not commensurate with it. It’s a parody of mechanical denouement, with a professorial figure (bow tie and all) sitting behind a desk to neatly explain each and every detail. Maybe that’s indicative of where the true strength of the movie lies: in its style, its mood, its occasional gems of script (Levine’s speech, or the final line). There’s no reason to write obits for Scorsese’s talent: he’s still got it.
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