Shutter Island (Martin Scorcese, 2010)
There's a storm coming - as signposted by Krzysztof Penderecki's ominously booming score - and for Scorcese it's all in the subtext. Pity it's enveloped by an overly talky thriller, because the dream sequences and the flashbacks are so florid, such fever dreams, that you wish you could escape to that world. Ted Daniels wishes he could, but is it something he wants to go back to, or escape? Or is it both? The film tantalises us with ambiguity, then wallops you over the head with melodrama and exposition. The island is full of symbolic markers and the connection to the troubled consciousness of Ted Daniels is hard to miss.
Scorcese is again really exploring American cinema, from the soundtrack bursting with avant garde works and some stark shots that bring to mind Kubrick, to the melodramatic, crazy pulpiness that the plot demands to be played with. Scorcese duly obliges with smoke, chiaroscuro, contrastingly luscious and dank interiors, tangled and precarious exteriors. The symbolic markers of the island are paralleled by the cinematic markers that Scorcese holds so dear.
Performances were good, the standouts being Michelle Williams, DiCaprio and Elias Koteas (he really
is a Canadian De Niro!). But that final act drags, as we have to talk it out like any good psychotherapy session, and the final flashback's pacing goes off, but is still bonkers beautiful and dreamlike and awfully sad. So, for me, the pacing was off, constrained by the plot's novelistic origins. The film is all in the detail, the real and emotional, the flesh and the brain, that Scorcese loves to explore.
PS. Since Gangs of New York (167 mins), the shortest DiCaprio film has been 119 minutes... the others: 138, 128, 141, 170, 151, 143. I mean, I love Leo, but how about a 90 minute one now and then?