Martin Scorsese (2010)
Shutter Island may raise questions about what kind of films Martin Scorsese wants to make nowadays but one thing seems clear: he wants to make them with Leonardo DiCaprio as the star (this is the fourth one running). As he is enormously rich and popular, as well as admired by plenty of people who know a lot about cinema, I don’t know why I should feel sorry for DiCaprio as a performer, but I’m starting to. Here he plays Teddy Daniels, a detective investigating the disappearance of a patient from Ashecliffe, an asylum for the criminally insane on an island off the Boston coast, and DiCaprio is very obviously trying his hardest. You know from Revolutionary Road what that means: furrowing his brow and jutting his jaw and, in the most dramatic moments of the story, making his eyes fill with tears and shouting. As in Revolutionary Road, there’s a moment late on in Shutter Island when DiCaprio stops trying to act, as a result of exhaustion – perhaps his own rather than Teddy Daniels’s exhaustion – and is briefly expressive but it’s no more than a moment. As in The Aviator, he’s not quite as bad when his character is in extremis (when he’s playing in a normal emotional range he might as well not be there); even then, though, he always seems to be struggling to stay up with the pace of the film-making.
Some people think DiCaprio’s limitations as an actor are a matter of his looking too boyish. It’s true that the best thing I’ve seen him do is play a mentally handicapped adolescent (when DiCaprio was himself eighteen or nineteen) in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? And in Shutter Island he sometimes suggests a boy in the upper sixth – the captain of a sports team who’s such a good egg that he’s agreed to appear in the school play, even though acting’s not his thing. But DiCaprio’s shortcomings go way beyond seeming youthfully lightweight: he doesn’t project any kind of intelligence (or lack of intelligence). When Teddy Daniels identifies a piece of music as Mahler, you just don’t believe it. When he says to the top brass at Ashecliffe, ‘Will you edify us?’, DiCaprio sounds as if the word is new to him. Shutter Island is a psychological thriller; its subject is Teddy Daniels’s state of mind and we finally see Teddy on the way to having a lobotomy. Casting Leonardo DiCaprio in the role is not only absurd but unkind.
Adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a novel by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote the source material for Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone), Shutter Island moves from being a detective story to dramatising the titular location as a state of mind to revealing the main character to be not a detective at all but the most disturbed patient in the Ashecliffe asylum. Scorsese seems impatient to get into the paranoid-delusional meat of the story – the picture is never sufficiently absorbing or realistically detailed as a police procedural. At the very start, Teddy looks into a bathroom mirror on the boat taking him and his fellow detective Chuck over from Boston to the island. ‘Pull yourself together’, he whispers desperately and, not long after his arrival at Ashecliffe, it’s become clear that he suffers from chronic flashbacks-cum-guilt-ridden-hallucinations. Scorsese’s image-making goes to tasteless lengths in Teddy’s memories of being a member of the US army entering Dachau in 1945. It’s one thing for the post-war Teddy to suspect anyone with a German name of being a crypto-Nazi or even for him to remember the gory botched suicide attempt of the SS commandant at Dachau. It’s quite another for his mind to picture Jewish corpses frozen into a beautiful blue tableau (an aestheticised image that is surely the product of Scorsese’s rather than the tortured Teddy’s imagination). Elsewhere, the visuals, including some spectacularly insistent tracking shots, are enjoyably melodramatic. Robert Richardson photographed the film and Thelma Schoonmaker edited it (as she has every Scorsese film in the last thirty years).
The denouement makes sense of much that’s been puzzling or unconvincing earlier in Shutter Island. (Not only is DiCaprio incredible as the experienced police detective he purports to be; Ben Kingsley’s ultra-calm rationality, as the chief psychiatrist at Ashecliffe, although it’s striking, doesn’t suggest anything more sinister beneath the surface.) The florid predictability of the story’s sub-themes – Nazi concentration camps, HUAC, the threat of nuclear war, doctors tampering with patients’ brains – is explained by their being the expressions of an anxious, shattered mind of the mid-1950s. There’s a ludicrous moment about thirty minutes in when one of the patients scribbles a note to Teddy, he and Chuck venture out in comically torrential rain, and Teddy takes that opportunity to show Chuck the message written in his notebook (at which point the rain eases off enough for the ink to run artistically slowly). At this point, you wonder if Scorsese is taking the thing seriously at all. Perhaps, in retrospect, even this kind of detail can be put down to the revelation that Teddy is the biggest nut in the asylum (although that’s pushing it). But eventually justifying the inadequate or underwhelming doesn’t seem much of an achievement – it would be more of one if we were convinced by the apparent then surprised by what was later revealed. As I watched the end of the film, I had a vague sense of uncertainty – could we be sure that the final explanation wasn’t another pretence and that Teddy hadn’t just been brainwashed? – but this doesn’t seem to be the impression of those whose reviews I’ve read (although Shutter Island is even weaker without this hint of uncertainty). These reviews reveal consensus that the film is an hommage but differences of opinion as to what – Hitchcock or B movies or something else. (Sight and Sound plays it very safe in suggesting ‘the cinema of the 1940s and 50s’!) If the homage is to B pictures it’s a pity Scorsese didn’t honour their brevity: at 138 minutes, Shutter Island is far too long. The story may relate to the plots of cheaply-made movies about the perils of crossing the threshold of an insane aslyum but the picture’s expensive look, technical craftsmanship and lack of raw energy seem far removed from B film-making.
Apart from DiCaprio, most of the acting in Shutter Island is accomplished – and, considering the quality of the material, carries a lot of conviction. Ben Kingsley is expert as Dr Cawley, even if it’s unsatisfying not to be able to admire a piece of acting until it’s nearly over (‘Now I see why he did it like that …’) As Dr Naehring, another senior psychiatrist at Ashecliffe, Max von Sydow is masterly. He plays with marvellous simplicity and mysterious power: you see Naehring’s mind constantly at work but you can never tell what he’s thinking. As Chuck, Mark Ruffalo gives an unshowy, unselfish performance that really pays off in the latter stages of the picture (Chuck turns out to be Dr Sheehan, Teddy’s shrink). Not for the first time in a Scorsese film about male agonies, there are some striking contributions in the female roles – Patricia Clarkson as a doctor, Michelle Williams as Teddy’s wife and, especially, Robin Bartlett as one of the patients. Williams successfully evokes (and modernises) mysterious female figures in films like Vertigo – without being glamorous, she has a strong sensual presence. I don’t remember seeing Robin Bartlett since her small role as Meryl Streep’s partner in rehab in Postcards from the Edge; Bartlett is piercingly good here as a patient who knows she’s crazy but can do nothing about it. The cast also includes Jackie Earle Haley, Elias Koteas and Emily Mortimer.
In spite of the quality of most of the actors and the skill and confidence with which Shutter Island is made, this is the third consecutive Scorsese picture – following The Aviator and The Departed (I’m excluding the documentaries about Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones) – that I’ve struggled to sit through. These earlier features came over as designed to win Scorsese his overdue Oscar; I hoped that, having won for The Departed, he might have got this out of his system and return to making films that seemed more personal and intense. Shutter Island is a relief to the extent that it doesn’t feel self-important, as its immediate predecessors did (and its release date, postponed from October 2009, suggests that Paramount didn’t regard it as a serious Oscar contender). It’s still bloated and emotionally remote, though. Sight and Sound describes it as a return to the paranoid universe of Taxi Driver but the difference in quality between these two films is shocking. In Taxi Driver, the best Scorsese film that I’ve seen, the fusion of the director’s realisation of New York and the protagonist’s state of mind was wonderfully imaginative and sustained. It’s not just the gulf between the talents of Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio that makes Shutter Island so relatively vacuous. The externals here don’t merely dominate – they fail to conceal the film’s hollowness.
Several reviewers have expressed some regret or puzzlement about Scorsese’s stooping to this material; in doing so, they take his greatness as a given. This made me realise that I do too and I thought I should check his filmography to remind myself what I think the greatness is based on. There are several films I’ve not yet seen (Who’s That Knocking at My Door, The Last Temptation of Christ, Casino, Kundun, Gangs of New York) – as well as all the documentaries except No Direction Home). There’s one film I have seen that I can’t remember at all (Boxcar Bertha). There are different kinds of failure: the fascinating (New York, New York, The King of Comedy); the respectable but unexciting (The Color of Money, The Age of Innocence); the uninteresting (Cape Fear, The Aviator, The Departed). That leaves – as well as Taxi Driver – Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Raging Bull (although I think it’s overrated), After Hours, Goodfellas, Bringing Out the Dead and, as Scorsese’s contribution to the New York Stories triptych, the superb Life Lessons. That’s more than enough to reassure me that Scorsese’s reputation is well-founded but it was worth taking stock.
18 March 2010
