Shutter Island – Hitchcock turning over in grave?
Stutter Island might have been better
The Atomic Writer liked this movie, but grew tired waiting for the last reel payoff that never really came. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is well worth seeing and is very entertaining, however with all the extravagant buildup I was let down in the end. I started to think is this the work of M. Night Shyamalan? Could he have been hired as a ghost writer for this project to avoid the expectations and justified letdown of his recent cinematic attempts? Sure the movie had all the beats of a classic noir psychological thriller, but the clutter of over the top visual imagery, a soundtrack dictating the movies conceit, and almost melodramatic performances leads me have to not recommend this movie to my readers. See it on DVD for sure, but save your money at the box office.
In the latest Martin Scorsese movie, Shutter Island, we find an overt attempt to create a masterpiece only leading to a forced payoff in the denouement. The story of two federal marshals sent in 1954 to an island off the coast of New England to investigate a dangerous missing patient. The dialogue on the ferry seems forced and full of exposition in an attempt to quickly reveal backstory. Add to this the cellos of Robbie Robertson’s score blasting away followed by freaking out violins, as the ferry arrives on the island, reminds me of a Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick movie.
The island creates a boxed, trapped in feeling with the electrified fences, iron gates, medieval maximum security building and jagged rocky cliffs along the shoreline. DiCaprio’s character, Teddy, begins to feel like he’s becoming a prisoner when the walls start closing in around him. Ben Kingsley plays the director of the facility who wants to use modern treatments on his patients, but what is he hiding? Max Von Sydow plays a character that reinforces Teddy’s nightmare of freeing German concentration camps during WW2. But who are these doctors? I would have liked to know more about them. Are they conducting Nazi like experiments on the patients? Remember this is the cold war era and this was very much on everyone’s mind. DiCaprio, is haunted by dreams of the war and of his late wife that are not needed in the story. Like flashbacks, only in a dream, these attempt to provide backstory that could be relayed through character actions. Characters are defined by how they act, not with what they say. Showing us the gruesome atrocity of Nazi concentration camps sends a familiar message, that killing and war are wrong, but seems out of place in this movie.
Mark Ruffalo’s sidekick character makes us wonder who’s side he’s on, and the movie uses misdirection very well in this sense. We become enthralled in the psychological torment DiCaprio is undergoing but where is it leading? All the tight close up’s, the eerie backgrounds, the soundtrack, and mystery eventually leads to a payoff that is too fast and cheap. DiCaprio makes it to the lighthouse only to find empty rooms and Ben Kingsley sitting at the top at a desk with a whiteboard (weren’t there only blackboards in the 1950’s) ready to explain all the misdirection and the little role playing game they were playing.
Wouldn’t have been better to let the game go fully awry? Perhaps DiCaprio escapes the island and continues his delusion on the mainland where he uncovers some truly meaningful reveals. Maybe he discovers a newspaper article on a missing federal marshal? Becomes an innocent on the run. You see where I’m going with this…
Shutter Island tries too hard to be great and like most things in life, trying to hard is not a good thing. The screenplay is an adaptation of a novel, and like most things coming out of Hollywood, original is not in the equation. Perhaps if Shutter Island was written as an original screenplay, it could have saved the film.
Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.
Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer
