Shutter Island, Uncle Marty’s mash-up of Jurassic Park and Gothika is long on length and short on intrigue and would have been much more interesting if it had turned out that….oops, never mind. This will be short because you can’t talk about this film too much without stepping into spoiler territory.
Many folks will be seeing it one way or another and will not be warned off by a mixed review. I’ll limit it to one semi-major spoiler below the warning at bottom. Leonardo gets all the screen time you’ll expect if that’s your pleasure. He’s not my type and acting-wise I don’t think he’s ever come up to the level of his performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. If he ever gets a few lines or scars on that baby face maybe we can buy him as a suspense lead. Mark Ruffalo delivers a fine understated performance while dodging Leonardo-chewed scenery. In fact it would have been a better movie if Ruffalo had the lead. And the whole cast seems to be slipping in and out of some kind of accent, whether Boston or Fifties, or foreign or whatever, except for Max Von Sydow. Master that he is he manages to maintain the gothic accent he’s had in every movie in which he’s ever been called upon to speak English since the turn of two centuries ago. I mean, he was old already in The Exorcist. and that was 1973!
Scorcese will draw auteur-loving cineastes thinking he’s the greatest director since Hitchcock and though he’s had flashes of storytelling brilliance (Casino) we would not go that far. Here he’s too obviously stepping into a suspense genre that he may not fully grasp, or which he allows to slip from his grasp.
Technically it was extremely hard to believe that there could be so many distracting continuity blunders. Head turned this way – cut – now it’s turned that way. Hand on arm – cut – hand off arm. It’s not that big a deal if it happens occasionally buy the movie is rife. Also the cinematic atmospherics promised in the trailer did not materialize.
Well reading over this maybe you should stop here to avoid all spoilerish material.
***Mild Spoiler Section***
There are some set-piece eerie scenes and some jump out scaries that anyone who’s been to two horror movies in their life will be able to anticipate. There’s some gore and plenty of unnecessary profanity. And just too much Leonard DiCaprio.
In and among all the serial implausabilities are long stretches of exposition and pontification that could easily have been cut and not be missed. The ending comes with one mighty final — and flat, if you ask me — twist that amounts to a deux ex machina of the sort that novice screen writers are warned direly against (I should know!)
So in general it’s a so-so- story with workman-like acting (except for Leo!) and directing, but not paced like a good thriller and not a masterwork of suspense by any stretch.
***Spoiler Section***
Well two semi-spoilers. At one point Leonardo speaks a line that implies his character does not know what a lighthouse is. “What is that tower?’” he says. What? Are you kidding? It looks like…well, just exactly like a lighthouse, Leo. Duh. Rubbing too close to super-brain Leo’s actual intellectual capacity kind of dropped the Fourth Wall for me and it was hard to overcome the rest of the way.
Also, for two and a half hours you’re exposed to some annoying equivalence in the whole brain-tampering sphere between the US and various oppressive tyrannies, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia to North Korea. HUAC is invoked and is IDed as the funding source for the island and the whole Red Scare is brought in. None of these associations are satisfactorily resolved away. A blank-slate viewer will retain much of it. But the most outrageous slander concerns the liberation of Dachau concentration camp at the end of WW II. That this complete and horrific fiction portrayed in the film and the indictment of US fighting men that goes with is not directly and completely refuted is reprehensible and has nothing to do with dramatic license to skew historical events just a bit. The crime depicted is impactful and the camera lingers on a striking image. Some viewers will come away from this movie thinking that’s what happened.
If you see it and want the real story. come back here and click on this link. be sure to check out the picture of the GIs as they encounter a surrendering German officer at the camp’s gate.
Concentration camps were horrible, their liberation plenty grim, but warped depictions such as in Shutter Island borders on desecration of the memories of the inmate and their liberators, as well as mental cruelty to the descendants.
