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Friday, February 19, 2010

Shutter Island is an enormous film.  A big, bold, brash bit of film that fires on every piston from moment one and never lets up.  In other director's hands the film would overwhelm, it's enormous moments and even bigger character beats would crash out of control amongst the absolutely nutso story line and lush visuals.  But this isn't just your run-of-the-mill Hollywood no-name puttering about, this is Martin Scorsese, for better or worse, one of the great over-indulgent directors of, well, ever.  And in his aged and talented hands, the looming excess of a film like Shutter Island is man-handled into a taut, horrific thriller and his best film in years.






Review - Shutter Island

Let's get this straight: I don't think Martin Scorsese's recent output has been indicative whatsoever of his career up to say, Gangs of New York.  As he's gotten older Scorsese seems to have completely and totally embraced the decadent filmmaking of films like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, indulging himself in a way that at times goes completely out of control.  Gangs of New York and The Aviator are both Scorsese films that suffer greatly from his love of excess.  They're bloated hulks of film that demanded less, when all Scorsese seemed to want was more, more, more.  The Departed is a step in the right direction, but still, the excesses of that film (can I say Jack Nicholson?) sully the film, and whenever I think back on it all I can remember is overly dramatic white lighting.

Shutter Island
 though is a perfect combination of Scorsese's ample talent and his love for the drastically theatrical.  Allowing Scorsese to craft a thirty-course meal of a film that leaves you contently full, not painfully bursting at the seams.  The story of deranged inmate (Emily Mortimer) in the early 1950s gone missing at the secrecy-shrouded, island-asylum Ashcliff and the two U.S. Marshalls (Leonardo Dicaprio and Mark Ruffalo) sent to find her is a small story at heart.  A film about the ghosts that haunt us both physically and mentally and in the hands of lesser director, could've been played small with the savage plot twists and performances toned down to a more intimate picture.  But that's not Scorsese in any way.  Instead what we get is a thriller that borders on horror writ large by one of the geniuses of American film.  And you can see Scorsese's glee at making such a big, entertaining film in every giant frame of Shutter Island
.  The gloves are off and Scorsese uses the freedom to turn up the intensity of every single frame to eleven.

Dicaprio's character, Teddy Daniels, is a man wracked by grief, grief for the wife he lost to a fire and to the terrible things he did during the war, and it plagues him throughout the film in a series of dreams and hallucinations that are absolutely beautiful to behold.  The film is long, by today's standards, and it feels long, but in a rather glorious way.  Each of the dream sequences isn't a hectic burst of flashy-editing, they are carefully crafted, Hitchcockian-paced pieces of art, stunning in their visual prowess.  They're big and they're beautiful, but their length feels necessary, as does everything in the film.  The small, short cuts of doors opening; the booming bassoon that shakes your seat; the beams of white light that illuminate the stark rooms of the asylum - all of them are parts of this gloriously woven tapestry.

Even the emotions on display in the film are enormous.  Teddy Daniels is a man on the verge of breakdown, and his bursts of anger and sadness and his general gritty attitude are captured perfectly by Dicaprio.  I am wont to say that this is the best performance we've seen so far by the still-young actor.  He wears the sadness, the paranoia, the fear that all is not right in the state of Ashcliff so convincingly, you'd think he'd experienced Dachau and the travesties that occurred there.  This film, in terms of acting, could've been justly declared a melodrama, and though yes, it does linger on the edges, the fine cast Scorsese presides over here, reign it in masterfully.

Anyway, this is a thick (but very entertaining) film that's hard to fully explain, so just do yourself a favor and check it out this weekend.  I think you'll agree that it's a great effort from Scorsese and all involved.
 


 

 

Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and the KEXP blog.  He also has his own Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.   If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his writings here at Side One: Track One then please do so here.


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