Staged Fright
The skies in Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island are one of the most remarkable special effects I’ve ever seen at the cinema: lowering and grey, impenetrably thick, and wholly impassive to human suffering, they’re a perfect doubling, visually and symbolically, of the claustrophobic atmosphere that pervades the film from start to finish. The skies are sublime because they’re so terrifically fake: ever the b-movie pasticheur, Scorsese and his special effects crew (most notably Visual Effects Supervisor Robert Legato and Production Designer Dante Ferretti) have opted against realism and have made the skies vibrantly, triumphantly unreal, like the skies seen in the process shots in older films—or, better, like the uncanny skies in the luminously contrived combination prints of Victorian photographers O. G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson: fictive skies, then, mental weather, a dystopian, world-smothering air. Seeing such a self-conscious and unapologetically bad use of CG in 2010—a few months after the commercial and artistic apotheosis of Avatar, harbinger of brave new standards in the realistic, immersive use of CG—is a lovely moment, a point of Benjaminian rupture, with Scorsese the cinematic prophet-flaneur looking, instead of forward to the sleek new contours of twenty-first-century digital cinema, defiantly backward to the glorious ruins of twentieth-century movies in all their meretricious splendor.
Unfortunately, the skies are not the only thing in Shutter Island, which for the most part is a cold porridge of a movie, a lumpy, unpleasant goo that one forces down unwillingly, hoping for a stray raisin or two before the mess is finished. The film is chiefly bad in that it’s a bore, a tedious, self-important exploration of that hoariest of Hollywood clichés, the troubled mind of the noble hero who fights against all odds a corrupt, unseen force that conspires to destroy him. Scorsese has swum in similarly unpromising waters before, in his neo-noir masterpiece Cape Fear, but whereas that tiny, tawdry gem was illuminated from within by its baroque flashes—Max Cady’s catalogue of tattoos; the overpowering air of fear, guilt, violence, and sex; the delirious ending (that 360-degree camera spin when the out-of-control houseboat hits the big tree branch in the river!)—Shutter Island is weighed down by its own, from the rusty catwalks and dripping pipes and peeling walls of the island’s mysterious insane asylum to the frequent, Technicolor, wholly sappy dreams of Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), a US Federal Marshall who is first sent to the island to investigate the disappearance of a female patient. Along the way he must investigate a conspiracy he thinks lies behind the patient’s disappearance, and also plumb the recesses of his soul, this latter a frequent Scorsese trope, familiar from films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Casino, etc., but one that here is flattened into banality by an over-earnest, over-talkative script by Laeta Kalogridis (based on a novel by Dennis Lehane), and a sense of heaviness and portentousness that ill fits the film’s deliciously schlocky premise. At times the feeling is uncannily close to those old ’40s and ’50s b-noirs, where an entire plot hinges improbably on a jury-rigged, deus-ex-machina folderol of the screenwriter’s, reeking of third-rate Freudianism and a leadenly deterministic view of the human psyche: one might be tempted to say of Shutter Island that “it’s just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis,” as Alfred Hitchcock said of his own Spellbound. For right from the start Daniels’s quest for the missing patient dovetails too conveniently with his exploration of his own inner demons, and we sense that the conspiracy he’s investigating is really the product of his own warped imagination: it isn’t long before we understand that Daniels is himself insane, an inmate on the island condemned to repeat, forever, his memories of having once been free. While the silliness of the concept might have been redeemed by some combination of virtuoso imagery, sound, editing, all working to create a portrayal of the inner experience of madness—think the recursiveness of Last Year at Marienbad crossed with the stark imagery of Claire Denis’s The Intruder, and scored by Bernard Herrmann—Shutter Island insists on an incessant literalism, a reconfiguration of the psyche’s unnamable monsters as so many seen-before cinematic props and mannequins: the lost wife, the madman in the cell, the doctor who might be evil. (At the film’s climax, Daniels actually has his madness spelled out for him via chalkboard, a new low in the cinema of mental-illness-as-cheap-plot-device.) When Daniels’s insanity is finally formally “revealed”—anyone not asleep in the audience has guessed it long before, likely within the first fifteen minutes—I couldn’t help but think of another Hitchcock film, his 1950 misfire Stage Fright, in which a false flashback that has provided the bulk of the film’s plot is finally, disastrously revealed as being false, thus invalidating the viewer’s entire experience of the film in favor of a hastily-tacked-on (to us) “real” ending. (Hitchcock called it “one thing . . . that I never should have done,” a rare admission of aesthetic failure from a notoriously imperial, mandarin director.) Shutter Island’s final revelation is even more objectionable in that we’ve seen it coming for some hours, have long since stopped caring about the plot’s tortuous (read: torturous) efforts to surprise and beguile.
There are actually some quite wonderful things in Shutter Island, moments of light and levity that sidle up uncomfortably against the taxidermied ghouls and goblins. Mark Ruffalo is great as Daniels’s partner/therapist Chuck Aule: rumpled yet earnest, Ruffalo brings a seedy gravitas that’s yet another of the film’s borrowings from the visual landscape of noir from half a century ago. John Carroll Lynch is suggestively creepy as Deputy Warden McPherson, and Ben Kinglsey as Dr. Cawley, Shutter Island’s head doctor, is occasionally terrifying, especially when he’s not expounding upon this or that treatment or theory. At times, the film’s investment in Daniels’s madness reaches operatic heights, offering indelible images—Daniels entering the asylum in a truck, the walls and towers soaring over him like a vast medieval castle, the home of evil giants; or Daniels rising from Boston Harbor and approaching the asylum’s iconic lighthouse, where he’ll either find the final truth behind the conspiracy or die trying (in a sense, he does both, as his madness is revealed to him here): with these images Shutter Island reaches for, and achieves, a visual poetry that shows, rather than merely tells, the heroic dimensions of Teddy Daniel’s lurid delusions. And there’s a bravura overhead tracking shot that seems to come straight from the opening of both The Night of the Hunter and They Live By Night, as we see from far off Daniels entering the asylum, and zoom in on him with a vertiginous, dreamlike speed: more of these shots—where the visuals do the work of advancing the narrative, embodying its themes without the need for tendentious exposition—would have been better. Unfortunately, these moments pass by in fits and starts, and we’ve lurched off once again into another long scene rife with dialogue, extraneous characters (Max von Sydow as a perhaps-once-a-Nazi-doctor? But why?), faux-symbolist dream montages (in which Michelle Williams as Daniels’s dead wife doesn’t have much to do, despite her ravishing ’50s housedresses), and yet more dialogue (the Warden, played by Ted Levine, delivers a particularly unconvincing “life is violence, killing, and death” speech that reads as if cribbed right out of the Judge’s great paean to violence, killing, and death in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) and more dialogue again. The bathetic apotheosis of all of this comes during Daniels’s final, traumatic flashback, in which we learn that it’s he who is responsible for his wife’s death: that Daniels killed her in retaliation for her murder-by-drowning (she was mad, alas) of their children. Cradling the sodden corpses of his children, standing chest-deep in the lake in which they’ve drowned, Daniels rears back and lets forth with a bloodcurdling “Noooooooo!” that’s a perfect gloss—both shining example and absurdist deconstruction—on all other bloodcurdling “Noooooooo!”s ever bloodcurdlingly “Noooooooo!”ed on film. The moment made me and my companion chortle uproariously, easily my most honest, most heartfelt response to the film: such a necessary catharsis, such a purgation through laughter of pity and fear!
It’s a bit of a drag to have Shutter Island come on the heels of Scorsese’s wonderful late-period work, after the luridness of Gangs of New York, the glittering surfaces and frank cinemaphilia of The Aviator, the lean-and-dirty nastiness of The Departed: even compared to the Rolling Stones’ concert-film Shine a Light (which is hardly The Last Waltz but is still completely watchable), Shutter Island seems like a bloated, misshapen mess. What strikes most about the film is its irrelevance: let’s call it Scorsese’s Marnie (with DiCaprio as Tippi Hedren), another long and drasty psychodrama that reads today as either an attempt at a final masterwork or as its maker’s artistic cenotaph and mausoleum. Shutter Island is thankfully neither, but it’s bad enough to make me feverishly await the next good Scorsese film.
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