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Shutter Island

April 12, 2010:  Shutter Island

This whole process of reviewing all the movies I watch must be seriously screwing up my viewing habits.  How is it possible that in over a year and a half of writing, I haven’t seen a single Martin Scorsese film?

I guess it must be true.  And in order to try and get back on track, instead of writing for days and picking apart the career magnificence of Scorsese, I will instead go with a more compact review here of his new film, Shutter Island, and promise myself a viewing of something else of his very soon.

Shutter Island stars Scorsese’s current muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, as a federal marshal in 1954 Boston who is investigating the escape of a patient from a mental institution on an isolated island in the area.  Ben Kingsley, as the doctor running the institution, seems to be acting suspiciously right from the start, and as Leo delves deeper and deeper into the unconventional medical techniques utilized on the island, he becomes more and more determined to expose these horrors to the world.

I’m not going to go too far into the plot of this twisting and deceptive tale.  In summary, it’s a bit overstuffed and perhaps has one too many redundant examples of how the doctor seems to be screwing with Leo’s head, but otherwise I liked it quite a bit.  Solid supporting work from Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow, Patricia Clarkson, and Michelle Williams brings an effortless gravitas to the proceedings, which is the privilege of such established master filmmakers.  We’ve also got Ted Levine, the creepy Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  Lush production design in flashbacks of Leo’s deceased wife, and harrowing recreations of his wartime experience liberating concentration camps, go hand in hand with the stylized look of the cold and wet 1950s east coast environment.  The creepy vibe relies perhaps just a bit too much on carefully placed thunder and lightning, but it is arguably appropriate considering how exposed and harsh the island is.  I’m a longtime fan of the work of cinematographer Robert Richardson, who has worked heavily with Scorsese and Oliver Stone in the past, and more recently with Quentin Tarantino.

My feeling was that the ending was ambiguous, but that also leads me to believe that I’ll read a review which confidently points out exactly what happened, with proper supporting evidence cited.  I’m OK with this ending being uncertain, and while Shutter Island is not a Scorsese masterpiece, for me it still stands head and shoulders above most of what I see these days.

A real auteur continues to experiment.

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