The Ashcan

Reeling: “Shutter Island”

Posted on 03. Mar, 2010 by Jef in Film, Reeling

Leonardo DiCaprio channels ghosts of Hitchcock past in "Shutter Island"

To all of you criticizing Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island because you could see the “twist” ending an hour away: YOU NEED TO RELAX. The reason you saw the surprise coming was because it was hardly the film’s raison d’être. i.e. It wasn’t a surprise, Sherlock. This ain’t no post-The Sixth Sense bait-and-switch Shyamalan screw job. Part of the joy of Scorsese’s latest flick is figuring shit out way before Leonardo DiCaprio’s hard-boiled marshall Teddy Daniels does, and then watching him flounder around in a sad display of confidence and misplaced chutzpah.

Why else would Scorsese send Daniels feverishly up a squeaky spiral staircase in an homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo? Like James Stewart’s doomed lover boy character Scottie, Daniels’s grip on things is furious but tenuous. The more he learns the less he knows. We watch him play detective and work his way up a symbol of enlightenment, a church in Vertigo, a lighthouse in Shutter Island — but by then we fully know he’s more in the dark than he cares to see. Scorsese, the tricksy imp, hasn’t hidden anything from us. We don’t just see the ball under the magician’s cup, we see the cup disappear and re-appear. And by the end he’s not even being coy anymore; he’s dazzling you with everything he has in his bag. He doesn’t care what you do or don’t know, the point is he’s got some shit he wants to show you.

Shutter Island is Scorsese doing what he doesn’t do very often: geeking out. Hitchcock isn’t the only reference to be enjoyed in this noir-ish pulpy genre-fest. The film’s marketing sold Daniels’s investigation of the breakout of Shutter Island’s most dangerous mental patient as a horror flick; one can see why — it’s the easiest angle and Scorsese spends a good deal of time crafting horror movie money shots — but there’s more to it than that. Mood is important here. It’s suffocating. It’s ALL mood. The biggest bait in the movie is that you expect it to be all plot — clues and conspiracies and tight character beats — but with the characters being more ciphers than anything the film floats on its sensualist waves. Memories are more important to Shutter Island than mind games. And what is memory anyway but the ultimate mind game?

The heart of the film is hidden beneath a layer of artifice that likely will alienate some viewers. It begins on a boat with a backdrop water effect (Hitchcock fans might get a stiff one), DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo deliver lines like they drew a “Boston accent” card in an improv class, and Sir Ben Kingsley might as well be petting a black cat, evil and ominous as he is. The film’s hokeyness works though, in all the ways it is supposed to. It’s all brought to a head by DiCaprio’s final line, which unlike the “twist” is the film’s ultimate talking-point. The line haunts in a subtle way, its implications greater and more unsettling than all of the smoke and mirrors that preceded it.

Shutter Island doesn’t do anything new, but it does things I ADORE about movies in general, and this time done by Scorsese. Which is exactly all I was looking for. Call me crazy.

Tags: Emily Mortimer, genre-benders, Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Leonardo DiCaprio, M. Night Shyamalan, Mark Ruffalo, Martin Scorsese, Patricia Clarkson, Shutter Island, Sir Ben Kingsley, twist endings, wow hard to write about without spoilers