SHUTTER ISLAND review: let me off the island

SHUTTER ISLAND review: let me off the island

Feb 19

Shutter Island is a strange movie, but not in the way it intends to be: it’s strange because it’s bad. Martin Scorsese isn’t the critical and commercial king he is today because he makes movies that suck. But he’s managed the impossible here — he’s made a bad film. ”But the trailer is awesome,” you say, tears running down your trembling face in denial. Well, the trailer is not only violently spoilerific, it’s a tad misleading. For example, if you’re expecting, as implied in the trailer, an unpredictable, thrilling, mind-bending journey into the realm between sanity and bat-shit banananess, you’re going to be sorely let down. If, perhaps, you’re expecting a tightly-wound detective story wrapped around crazy criminal antics, you’re also going to be severely disappointed by the film’s total failure to be in any way ‘tight’ or compelling. And if you’re expecting brutal scenes of gut-wrenching violence or moral ambiguity, you’re going to snooze your way through this film from start to finish. I guess if you’ve never seen a single movie before in your entire life, Shutter Island might blow your mind, but that’s praise as faint as it comes.

The plot is, as I said, laid bare, bald and naked in the trailer. Leonardo DiCaprio plays  federal marshal (precisely what marshalling do these folk do — do they marshal herds of sheep, or armies, or justice, or what?) Ted Daniels, who is sent to investigate a mysterious patient breakout at an obviously-dodgy mental asylum situated somewhere in the stormy waters off Boston. All is not as it seems (surprise!), Ted might be crazier than he thought (no way!), there appears to be some federal-level conspiracy going on (really?), and worst of all, the asylum seems to be dredging up some of Ted’s disturbing memories of World War 2 (hmm). The trailer promises a twist, and if you’ve ever seen something like Fight Club or The Sixth Sense or even Hide And Seek you’ll smell the twist coming a mile away and be hideously disappointed when the curiously anticlimactic “revelation” scene rolls by with little to no fanfare. You’re probably thinking “aha! But Scorsese is a genius, he’ll take the twist and put a double-twist on it!” Well you’re wrong again, chump, and I wish you’d stop assuming things about movies you’ve obviously never seen. Let me take over.

The film starts off on a boat. Right off the bat Scorsese appears to be trying to make the audience feel ill at ease by making nearly every single cut in the scene noticeable. They’re all jarring, and ostensibly deliberately so. People standing in slightly different places, facing different angles when you cut from the wide to the close — it’s so frequent and sloppy that it couldn’t have happened by accident on a Scorsese set. So we’re left with the uneasy conclusion that he wants to jar us, to make us irritated and aware of the stitched-together nature of film. There are so many other ways to make an audience uneasy, to nudge and cajole and disturb them through canted angles, sinister performances, mismatched colours — anything – but to violate one of the most important, basic functions of films is super annoying. Well, it was annoying to this humble cinephile, and it doesn’t let up after the opening scene.

Needless to say, the cinematography and music are gorgeous. Scorsese’s eyes and ears appear to be functioning quite well despite the apparent failure of his common sense and drive of purpose. The island, once we get to it, is suitably brooding and sinister and violent in its own way. The score is borderline irritating, but manages to ride that thin line between mysterious, ominous, and ridiculous. Performances are all fundamentally fine as well; Ben Kingsley in particularly is a treat as Shutter Island’s head psychologist. He’s restrained, polite and remarkably charismatic in the role, and brings a sense of nobility and dignity to the potentially silly proceedings.

And silly the proceedings are. You get the distinct impression that everything in the first hour of the film is just one big red herring, and then you find out everything in the second hour is also nothing but a red herring (by which time you’re both annoyed and bored), and then the last ten-minute segment turns around, wiping a tear of laughter from its eye, and cries “you idiot, the first two hours were for nothing! Ha ha, oh wow, you are stupid for believing any of that.” I don’t understand how screenwriters still get a kick out of destroying every single scene they’ve meticulously built over the past two hours by throwing in bullshit revelations like “and then he woke up — it was all a dream!” or “and then John realised he was the demons” or “it turns out this primary character is just a figment of the protagonist’s imagination.” When a story betrays you like that, it sucks. And you know Shutter Island is probably going to do this from the outset, but you find yourself hoping the whole time that those last ten minutes will lead to another ten-minute segment where the twist gets re-twisted, or un-twisted, or somehow broken and bent in an unpredictable manner. Alas, Shutter Island ends exactly where you’d expect it to, and doesn’t provide any original or stimulating food for thought.

Another peculiar aspect of the film is how self-contained it is. It doesn’t speak to the times (the 1950s setting is seemingly arbitrary beyond aesthetic and technological expedience), it doesn’t tackle big, compelling themes (flashbacks that deal with the holocaust are somehow out of place and dull — how can you possibly fail to make the holocaust compelling?), and manages to make the most horrific crimes seem mundane and trivial (the drowning of children by a deluded wife appears to have been inspired by the real-life case of Andrea Yates — the wikipedia article on the actual murders is more compelling than the entire two hours of Shutter Island). The plot is pedestrian and the narrative muddled, but having something bigger to latch onto could have helped an audience through the lapses in coherence or fun, but we get no such breath of fresh air.

When I say the narrative is “muddled,” it’s deliberately so, ping-ponging back and forth between Ted’s investigation and some wacky dreams he gets on a disturbingly regular basis. The dreams are important and symbolically interesting, but they kind of kill the pace of the investigation plot. They’re vital come the “revelation” scene at the end, but before you know precisely what’s going on they’re just pretty and a tad boring.

Shutter Island is a strange, odd beast, simultaneously familiar and hard to come to terms with. The least predictable thing about it is that it is 100% predictable from start to finish. There are no flashes of wit or scenes of tension or portrayals of madness — just a lumbering, second-gear plot that takes its time on the long, bumpy road to nowhere. I find it hard to recommend to anyone besides hardcore DiCaprio or Scorsese fans, who will see it anyway “just because.” But the most mysterious thing about the whole affair is how such an esteemed, talented and experienced director as Martin Scorsese could drop the ball in such a spectacularly dull fashion, but that seems to be something of a trend lately. First Spielberg with Indiana Jones 4, then Peter Jackson with The Lovely Bones, and James Cameron with Avatar – add Shutter Island to the fast-growing list of duds spun out by otherwise brilliant men.

Shutter Island score

27/100