Juiced with primal parts of Kubrick and Lynch (and Hitchcock, Val Lewton, Siodmak, Lang et al), Scorsese's Shutter Island makes a dry run for DiCaprio's Teddy Daniel's consciousness and hits paydirt for about an hour before the opera its hiding takes control. In a way, every film fools an audience, so the gimmick in films like Shutter of fooling them twice only works once. Getting to play with the ripest paranoia of the 20th Century, Scorsese splits a mean, fearful ex-G.I. now Federal Marshall right in half and sends one of him in after a missing person's report is filed on Shutter Island, a unique, specialized hospital for the criminally insane. A prisoner/patient who vanished into thin air is the lure, and of course the case turns out has not one but two missing persons, both stemming from the same, hidden, central conflict. Recombinant backstory. Kind of a reverse "I Married a Communist", Scorsese spends most of his time orchestrating loaded and coded anguish that moves both forwards and backwards, through reality and through dream fantasy. Hell, the film is enough of a wild card that the island might not even be real (can you see water from Ward C, didn't his kids drown in water?). The anguish comes complete with walkway crosses and distorted spiral staircases that seem to repeat (there are some connecting, enticing visuals throughout). By following the flames of the initial 'crime' in a vision, we get to watch the central metaphor find its way home, it migrates from housefire to campfire and through two sets of fantasy masquerading as fanatacism. Where there's fire there's...By following the smoke, and the film opens in a dense fog (see above) we get to see which way things are really going, at a pivotal moment he shows us the smoke moving backwards (a la the flames in Lost Highway) and we know two pasts are merging without Teddy's control. The strange thing, the fire smoke and blood don't really meet in the central gotcha nightmare at the end, so we're left to wonder if Scorsese even understood the film he was making. Certain monologues are transmitted with a haze that vanishes when the timing is necessary (see: Kingsley's second to last speechifying). The embrace, the pivotal soul-shank of The Shining, is mirrored here, and by mirroring this and a few other gestures, it gets diffuse pretty quickly (even actors get to play dual characters), but there is no fun in the embrace, or the mirrors, no lure. Poe would and did have more fun shrieking with the unconscious past-future, and strangely, so did Scorsese's heirs, you wonder why it's all not really exciting then you realize Ben Kingsley is a terrible stand in for Vincent Price or Walter Pidgeon, he can't play both halves of a villain so he varies between good and evil. The crime being committed by the filmmakers is their lack of gestation improv with POV's. You can tell without reading the book Scorsese and his writers are taking Lehane seriously, and literally, and don't improvise other doorways the novel didn't try, they just condense it and add a few red herrings. Invoking The Shining is a cheapshot since that film was about altering every aspect of its source material. Kubrick made a full conversion to film, he made a film that defies the novel's medium. By separating 'fantasy' from fantasy, Scorsese and team stick to rules that keep their overall structure logical to a tee. They don't go deeper than the book and there's the rub, to make a masterpiece from pulp you have to transform it and none of that is occuring here. Had Kingsley or Sydow reappeared as inmates, or his wife as a well disguised suspect or patient, the film might never have to drift into Teddy's 'dreams': then Scorsese would have upped the ante and the possibilites. He would have to present apparent reality more vigorously. Since the veracity of most of the truth is up for grabs anyway, why not really send the audience home amazed, shocked at Teddy's inner distortions as opposed to his 'troubled visions' that veer towards music video interludes or drawn from fugue states in other, better films. And Scorsese's females, as usual afterthoughts at best, are constricted wooden pieces here, their pain veers from overwrought to mechanical (since they are reading from 'scripts'), here's where Kubrick always scored, since he knew how to record his actresses' unconscious, Scorsese expects these actresses to deliver 'the method' in five takes but they're unsure how to play it. Michelle Williams can't raise her performance above a high school musical since her task is insurmountable, she's literally on her own in those memories, Scorsese doesn't craft subtle alternates, he's more comfortable with jump-cutting (a Scorsese rarity) than with distortions in revelations (a Scorsese never). Since Teddy is essentially searching for himself, we get only fleeting glances of the mayhem penetrating 'reality' (early on motions are distorted, there seem to be subtle continuity errors, even in backgrounds) and these should have remained the fullest experience in distortion. The graphic sensibilities at times are right on target; as Teddy tours the head-shrink's office and spots an engraving with a mental patient, his head strapped to a blinder box with an arched doorway shape as the view-portal, Teddy seems to know the box is in effect. It is. Watch the archway grace the film endlessly. Ward C's central courtyard is a redo of D.C.'s rotunda only darkened into near invisibility (check the panels) and pulled into darkness from the engraving's slit. It's too bad the overall layout of the island is strictly videogame-lame, Ward C feels lobbed onto the film's exceptional campus symmetry, it's just the nightmare added to the enlightenment's revival urban planning. It looks sloppily conventional. And the chain-link patterns, reused endlessly too, are more of a giveaway, the question becomes where (what ward) does Teddy experience this all from? Even lamer is the faux drama of the staginess, we know looking back how weird it all looked because we know who Teddy is, or who he thinks he is. The problem with Shutter Island is there is no villain, it's not really that fun (and it could have been) the cat and mouse is purely didactic, we're led to the shocking finality staged as a pastoral fantasy, and it rings hollow since it can only be as staged as Minority Report's fantasy island ending. He wants us to think it's real but the lingering doubt is necessary and a component to Scorsese's near stoicism. Something feels flatly cynical in all these mindgames. And that's where the film dies, it doesn't make the ending real at all, Scorsese stages the lake scene in overdone technicolor, like a Sirk or an Anthony Mann film, but the choice makes no sense anymore. Is he claiming Teddy's guilty either way because his 'memory' romanticizes his nightmarish discovery and subsequent revenge? He can't possibly believe Teddy is the villain but DiCaprio is rapidly exposed and left in the archetype, he's the one that could be visiting his wife here but instead he's here: the guilty replacing the guilty. The film's gotcha ending is the letdown and it converts any villain, even the island itself, into a wildcard. A film made for psychiatrists by psychiatrists that ends up worshipping them and their art (talk about a code-sharing with directors). The same paranoia that suffused and ended The Aviator ends it here needlessly, since we assume that Teddy knows who he is and is in the end, just faking it now, and it's incomplete enough to have Chuck call him Teddy before the needle is shown. Scorsese wants to leave the audience guessing but it's the cheapest shot of all: The staff know him much better as Teddy. Next stage for Leo is the similarly dreamworld caper Inception. Let's hope Nolan doesn't botch it as badly as this.
