(This will be a spoiler free review. It would be a great disservice to the film to reveal pretty much anything about the story beyond the basic premise established in the trailer. So I won’t.)
1994 was a big year for me. A lot of things happened that year that changed and defined me both as a person and as an artist. A tormented singer from a band I didn’t particularly care about committed suicide, forcing me to not only rethinking my views of suicide (which, for me, was a deeply personal and frankly, ever present concept to ponder) but my views of what an artist is and how an artist is defined by his art.
More importantly than that, 1994 was also the year that I paid to watch the movie Pulp Fiction six times in the theater. There were three movies that I saw in 1994 that drastically redefined the course of my life.
It was Pulp Fiction that made me realize that I not only loved movies with every fiber of my being, but that I desperately wanted to be involved with the creation of movies. Pulp Fiction was the movie that made me consider what the role of the screenwriter actually is. What the role of the director is. I knew intellectually what those jobs were, but Pulp Fiction made me consider the actual craft behind it.
The second movie I saw in 1994 that changed my life was Clerks. Now, I’ve got my issues with Kevin Smith, but I’ll never deny that it was Kevin Smith who made me believe that not only did I want to be involved in movies, but that I actually COULD be involved in movies. I’d been tossing around the idea that I might want to be a special effects makeup artist or a production designer. Possibly a writer. It was Clerks that made me realize that I didn’t have to aim low and be content to just be there. I could actually DO it. I could be THE GUY who makes the movie. That I, Joe Humphrey, could take it upon myself to make a film. All I had to do was lower my standards. I could make a movie on credit cards with local actors and shoot on Super 16mm film. Clerks was the movie that made me want to not only be involved in films, but to make them myself.
The third movie I watched in 1994 was Taxi Driver. Now, Taxi Driver wasn’t my first Martin Scorsese movie. By that point I’d seen Goofellas, After Hours, The Last Waltz, The Last Temptation of Christ and Cape Fear. I was well aware of who Martin Scorsese was. What I didn’t know was what exactly he did in these movies. What his contribution to the film was. I knew it was his name associated with the movies, but I didn’t really understand what his actual job was. All I had was a basic understanding of what a director does, which came almost entirely from a video tape I had that came with my copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a video that showed how all the major stunts were put together and I watched it religiously.
There were two scenes in Taxi Driver that clearly and directly showed exactly what a director does. One was the scene where Travis Bickle (the film’s anti-hero protagonist/antagonist, played by Robert DeNiro at his absolute best) takes Iris (the teenage prostitute played by Jodi Foster) to a diner for breakfast and he’s trying desperately to talk her out of her life as a hooker.
There was that scene, but even more so, it was this scene where Travis is calling up the girl he’s desperately trying to impress (played by Cybill Shepherd) after a disastrous first date, and he’s practically begging her to go out with him again. It’s clear, just from hearing his end of the conversation, that she’s really not interested seeing him again, and when Travis asks if she got the flowers he’d sent her, the camera pans away from him and points at the empty hallway next to him. It was as though what we were witnessing was so pathetic and so sad and so embarrassing that we simply couldn’t stand to look at it.
I had to rewind and rewatch that scene again and again because I knew there was something very important and very special about it. Finally I understood that THAT is the director’s job. Up to that point I’d thought of film directors as kind of hired monkeys whose sole purpose was to put together images to tell a story. I thought of them as almost interchangeable, the only real defining characteristics between them were aesthetic. I thought that Steven Spielberg could have directed Star Wars and told basically the same story the same way. Or that Francis Ford Copella could have directed Goodfellas and told basically the same story the same way.
It was when I saw that camera pan away from Travis Bickle’s depressing, desperate phone call, that I realized that Martin Scorsese made that choice. We were seeing the movie through his eyes. We were seeing the movie in a way that was completely unique, because of the choices he was making with his camera. I understood that Taxi Driver wasn’t just a great story about emotionally disturbed cabbie, but that it was a masterfully crafted film that only exists because of unique vision of it’s director.
From that moment on, the name Martin Scorsese was (and is) synonymous in my mind with great filmmaking. As I’ve grown and become more and more obsessed with movies, I’ve come to revere Scorsese the way that most fans of this art form do, but all of that love and respect and admiration originates, for me, in that one panning shot in Taxi Driver. Had I not seen that movie at that time in my life, and noticed that particular choice he made, I’d probably be quite a different person today.
If Pulp Fiction made me want to be involved in movies (really, it made me want to write movies) and Clerks made me realize that I could make movies, it was Taxi Driver that made me want to make good movies. Amazing movies. Movies with as much artistic merit as anything else out there in any other medium. Martin Scorsese and Taxi Driver made me love the art of filmmaking.
So when Martin Scorsese speaks, I listen. When he makes movies, I watch. I love and respect Martin Scorsese probably more than any other filmmaker out there, both for his overall contribution to the world of film, but even more so for that one scene… that one shot… that changed my life forever. Martin Scorsese isn’t my all favorite filmmaker, but he’s the one I respect the most. He’s the filmmaker whose approval I would most appreciate.
One of the things I love the most about Martin Scorsese is his ability to consistently impress me. Sure, there have been missteps along the way (Bringing Out the Dead is the only one I can think of off the top of my head) but even then, when he’s missed the mark, he’s done so while still being one of the best filmmakers out there. They were misfires, but spectacular ones by any other standard.
That brings us (finally) to Shutter Island, the newest cinematic offering from Martin Scorsese.
Martin Scorsese made a goddamned horror movie. When I said that he continues to surprise and impress me, this film is no exception. This was simply one of the most entertaining, interesting and well made films I’ve seen in years. And it was a goddamned horror movie.
Okay, that’s a little misleading. First and foremost, it’s film noir. It’s a hardboiled detective movie in every way, shape and form. It’s also an expertly crafted mystery. But it’s also friggin scary! It’s downright disturbing in a lot of places. Watching this movie made me long for a Scorsese directed HP Lovecraft story.
The basic premise (and I won’t reveal any more than that, story wise) is that Leonardo DeCaprio’s character is a US Marshal sent investigate the disappearance of a patient at a mysterious mental institution located on a small island outside of Boston. That’s all you need to know about this movie before seeing it. In fact, that’s more than you need to know. If you hear someone talking about the story or plot points, I’m begging you to stick your fingers in your ears and go “LA LA LA LA LA” because this movie deserves to be watched completely unspoiled.
One of the things that was so refreshing about this movie, as a Martin Scorsese movie, is that it doesn’t feel like it has an agenda. So many Scorsese movies feel like there’s something in there that Marty wants to tell us. Gangs of New York, while being an awesome movie, also felt like a commentary about America. The Last Temptation of Christ, while also being an awesome movie, clearly had an agenda as well.
Shutter Island doesn’t have that kind of drive to it, and that’s surprising and refreshing. This is Martin Scorsese simply telling us a story the way only he can tell it. Like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull or Goodfellas, this was Scorsese doing what he does best, which is expertly visualizing a fantastic story in a way that no one else can touch. It wasn’t a huge epic like Gangs or The Aviator. It wasn’t a commentary on anything. It was simply a great story told by a master storyteller.
It reminded me of The Departed in that way, honestly. While The Departed isn’t one of my favorite Scorsese movies (I did enjoy it, but I would have enjoyed it more had I not seen the original film and knew all the twists and turns) it was refreshing in that it felt like just a movie for the love of movies. No agenda, no commentary, no social perspective… just an awesome story.
One of the things that defines Shutter Island as a Scorsese movie is that he tends to make movies about lonely, broken people who are desperate for approval and love. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a single Scorsese film (aside from his music documentaries) that didn’t center around a beaten down, desperate hero. Not just underdogs, but people who are genuinely destroyed by life. Shutter Island perfectly fits into this formula and it’s lead character makes a fantastic addition to Scorsese’s arsenal of damaged anti-heroes.
Something that really stood out to me about this movie were some of the little tricks he used to unnerve us. Subtle things that you may or may not notice, but that make us uncomfortable just because it’s just slightly off.
There was a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining where Shelly Duvall’s character is explaining to a doctor how her son broke his arm. One of the things Kubrick did in that scene was he deliberately created continuity errors. The most obvious was that the length of ash on Shelly’s cigarette, and the level of water in her drinking glass kept changing from shot to shot. If you’re a casual film watcher, you might dismiss this as simply a mistake. If you’re familiar with Kubrick and how obsessively meticulous he is, it becomes clear that it was a very deliberate choice. Most importantly, if you don’t notice it at all, you’re more than likely going to find yourself uncomfortable watching that scene and don’t understand why. It’s because he’s taken something so quick and subtle that it barely registers, and you know, on some level, that it’s wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.
Scorsese used the same kind of method in Shutter Island as well. In one scene, a character asks for a glass of water. One is put down in front of her and she picks it up and quickly drinks the water. The thing is though that when she brings the glass to her mouth, her hand is empty. She’s miming drinking water from a glass, then she puts the imaginary glass back on the table, and it’s a real glass again. It happens so fast that I almost didn’t catch it. Another thing he does is that there are quite a few shots of Leo smoking, and the smoke is going backwards. Rather than exhaling, the smoke is running into his mouth and nostrils. It’s subtle, and so simple, but it works.
Something else that he does that’s so simple but so effective is that he casts actors known for having played murderers and child molesters other sorts of terrible people in the movie. He uses our own history with movies against us. We’ve got a security guard played by John Carroll Lynch, who played the primary suspect in the movie Zodiac. We’ve got Ted Levine playing the deputy warden. Ted Levine is typically best known for having played Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. We’ve got Jackie Earle Haley playing a patient in there, who famously came back from obscurity by playing a child molester in the movie Little Children. Another patient is played by Elias Koteas (who I will always think of as Casey Jones from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie) who played the Rolling Stones singing/John Goodman possessing serial killer in the movie Fallen. I don’t think that the casting of these actors is a coincidence. I think Scorsese was deliberately playing on our preconceived images of these actors. When I see Elias Koteas, my brain instantly starts singing “Tiiiiiime… is on my side… yes it is!”. When I see Ted Levine, I think “PUT THE FUCKING LOTION IN THE BASKET!”. Even when these actors aren’t necessarily playing specifically evil characters in Shutter Island, it’s still makes those character seem shady and wrong, which just adds to the whole atmosphere of strangeness.
Another thing I loved about this movie was Michelle Williams. I’m so glad that of all the Dawson’s Creek alumni, she’s the one whose turned out to be respected and successful artistically. Because I’ve always thought she was really good. Even on Dawson’s Creek, I thought she was better than that show. She didn’t play a huge part in this movie, but the part she played was fantastic.
Ben Kingsly is perfectly cast as the mysterious head of the hospital, perfectly balancing the sinister with the sincere. It’s the kind of role he’s best at, and he’s certainly not under used here.
If I have any problem with this movie, it’s a very small one. That’s Leonardo DiCaprio. Here’s my issue with Leo. It’s not that I think he’s a bad actor. I don’t. I think he’s quite a good actor. I just don’t buy him as a hardass. I can’t. It’s more of a personal hangup of mine than anything to do with his abilities as an actor. I just can’t see him as anything but a teenager. I’ve considered the possibility that it’s because I grew up watching Growing Pains on TV, and that was my first exposure. But I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s just his face. He LOOKS like a kid. He looks like a guy who could never grow a beard. So when I see him getting up in peoples faces and yelling and being Mr. Tough Guy, it just kind of makes me laugh.
Luckily, that also kind of works in this movie, because while his character wants to be a tough guy, it becomes clear pretty quickly that he doesn’t pose much of a threat to anything. It makes tough guy act almost pathetic and sad, like a little chihuahua growling and barking at you. So it’s not a big gripe, just more of an observation. I think we all have to accept that, for whatever reason, Scorsese has recruited DiCaprio to be his new De Niro.
The movie is visually amazing. I’ll take Shutter Island over Avatar any day of the week as far as visuals go. James Cameron may think he’s king shit of the universe when it comes to visual filmmaking, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Scorsese’s ability to tell a story in a aesthetically amazing, relevant way. That’s one of the things that sets Scorsese apart from other filmmakers who love to paint these broad, fantastic images. He only does so when it supports the movie. He’s not creating visually stunning images simply for the sake of looking pretty. He’s telling us the story and the visuals support the story. They convey emotion and history and mystery. Scorsese’s visually are both stunning and relevant. There’s one shot in particular that stood out for me, and it would be hard to explain it without giving away some of the plot, so I guess I won’t. But yeah.
Anyway, I’m getting pretty tired and I’m starting to ramble so I’ll wrap this up.
Shutter Island was a solid, fascinating, beautiful film. I would recommend it to pretty much anyone. Like Taxi Driver and Cape Fear and The Departed, it’s Scorsese doing what he does best… just telling a great story for the sake of great storytelling.
Posted on February 24th, 2010 by Joe Humphrey
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