Shutter Island (2009)
Shutter Island(USA) Directed by Martin Scorcese Written by Laeta Kaligrodis Starring Leonardo DiCaprio; Mark Ruffalo; Ben Kingsley; Max Von Sydow; Michelle Williams; Patricia Clarkson; Emily Mortimer; John Carroll Lynch; Elias Koteas; Jackie Earl Haley
The Cinema Guy usually has little interest in horror/ghost stories. Further, being no fan of the latter part of Martin Scorcese’s career, the concept of Shutter Island seemed to bode little promise from this viewer’s narrow perspective. Given Scorcese’s difficulties in regard to location and accent in the highly over praised The Departed, the fact that this, his follow-up film, was also set in the Boston area seemed to portend major problems. Surprise, Scorcese returns to creating something that feels like more than a bid for immortality in the form of Oscar gold. Rather than a paint by numbers biopic, or an action cartoon posing as crime or historical drama, we get an artistically rendered, gorgeously photographed (by consummate pro Robert Richardson) psychological exploration using well-handled touches of surrealism. There are shades of Scorcese’s Cape Fearpresent, but the film is at once more tightly contained, and also riskier in its evocation of the supernatural, than that re-make. Using Dennis Lehane’s source novel (who gets exec producer credit), a writer who shares with Scorcese a deeply rooted Catholic perspective, Scorcese takes on the personal ravages of war as it relates to memory, enhancing the better elements of the book, and (with the help of long time partner, designer Dante Ferretti), respecting Boston native Lehane’s feel for the history of the area. Set in 1954, Scorcese’s visuals are suberb, and no one would question the master’s ability to authenticate period. In DiCaprio, he has found his new age Deniro, and while their partnership has thus far yielded a selection of inferior films when compared to the incomparable former pairing, the actor’s performances have not been the problem. While DiCaprio struggled with an inconsistent (though far from the worst) Boston accent, here, as agent Teddy Daniels, he does a surprisingly solid job, improvement demonstrating continued work as he rolled into the next film, a credit to a gifted actor with an obvious drive to be better. The youthful looking DiCaprio is starting to fill out physically as an adult male, the age lines and added weight now an asset to his embodiment of individuals with lived life under their belt. While he seemed intermittently uncomfortable playing a tough guy in The Departed, here he is perfectly at ease as a WWII combat vet and federal agent. No American actor with the exception of Sean Penn and perhaps Benecio Del Toro does pain as well as DiCaprio, and his performance lives and breathes in his eyes and well modulated facial expressions. The film is well cast with an exceptional roster that includes an embarrassment of riches in the form of Max Von Sydow, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas, and Jackie Earl Haley. While the story is open to criticism surrounding twists that could be deemed derivative, the film does well maintaining the logic within the frame of the plot. While decidedly a genre entry, and somewhat limited by its scope, it is also Scorcese’s best work in years, and hopefully promises more future creative offerings from one of America’s greatest film historians and decorated living directors.