Sometimes Hollywood doesn’t make me want to puke

I know this may come as a shock to those of you who have been reading the movie review blog that this somehow turned into, but sometimes I like movies. It’s a rare occurrence, to be sure, but every once in a while Hollywood belches forth something that is neither a cheap cash-in or the bullet-riddled corpse of a good idea, and it makes my soul happy when my outrageously overpriced theater ticket admits me to something worthwhile. Such was the case with Shutter Island.

Fair warning: I will do my best not to spoil anything about the movie, but for god’s sake, it’s a psychological thriller, so it’s going to be difficult to discuss it without letting at least a few beans spill. If you’re the kind who like to bitch and moan about knowing something about a movie before you see it, then why in the fuck are you reading a review in the first place?

So yes, like most movie fans, I do generally love Martin Scorsese. True, there have been some clunkers along the way (the man did, after all, direct the video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad”), but all in all he’s got a solid, accomplished body of work. Shutter Island is a new direction for Scorsese, dabbling into psychological thrillers and even scraping the edge of the horror genre. He tackles this new challenge with aplomb, crafting a finely-tuned piece that confounds the viewer from the first moment and doesn’t release its hold until long after the credits roll. In fact, I had planned to write this last night after I watched the movie, but it took me until this afternoon to properly digest and process the mess that the movie had made of my state of mind. It’s a brain-fuck of a movie, to be sure, and in some ways it felt more like the work of David Lynch or David Cronenberg than Scorsese. There are the typical Scorsese elements: tough-as-nails cop with a dark secret and troubled past, thick eastern-seaboard accents, and a fascination with bygone America, but these don’t dominate the movie as much as the atmosphere does, which is something you don’t often see in his films. It is an oppressive atmosphere, an isolated asylum for the criminally insane on an island in Boston Harbor miles away from the closest land. It’s a beautifully designed set, desolate yet filled with people, sterile in some places and reminiscent of a Tower of London dungeon in others. And it has a notable lack of Wallgreens spider webs.

One of my most frequent complaints about movies is the pacing, and Scorsese has made his mistakes on this front before (I couldn’t even finish Gangs of New York because the damned thing never got moving), but the pacing here is spot-on. It’s as if all of those long, tension-filled pauses that were lacking from The Wolfman were somehow grafted into Shutter Island, and that deliberate pace is precisely what made the movie. There is one scene in particular, at the end of the movie, that demonstrates exactly what I said in my review of The Wolfman about getting a genuine scare out of people by a startle at the end of a long, tense buildup. The whole theater jumped out of their seats, yours truly included. It’s a long movie, clocking in at about 2:15, but though slow, it never drags. This is the key balancing act that so many movies fail to achieve. In its pacing, its hardscrabble anti-hero, its love of shadows and its twisty plot, Shutter Island is almost film noir, except that its flashbacks are vividly colorful.

Acting-wise, you couldn’t ask for a better cast. Leonardo DiCaprio is, I am willing to say, one of the best actors working today, and he delivers. Mark Ruffalo, though seeming for most of the movie to be channeling Chazz Palminteri from The Usual Suspects, does admirably in a fairly thankless role. And the supporting cast is completely phenomenal – Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sidow and Jackie Earle Haley, all in fine form (Haley, though his part is very small, delivers one of the most memorable performances of the movie). It is a superbly acted film.

Now, the plot. How I’m going to do this without spoilers remains to be seen. As I mentioned, this is a brain-fuck movie of the type only a few directors can pull off (eat your heart out, M. Night Shyamalan) and though the ending isn’t the explosive revelation that The Sixth Sense (which I have heard it compared to) is – and in fact I had marked the ending down at the beginning of the movie as one of the possible ways it would pan out – to me that’s not the point. The point is to spend your time inside the tangled mess of the story, live it out, and walk away contemplating your own sanity. Because at its core, this is a story about the fragility of sanity, and the illusions that we create for ourselves to survive. And upon leaving the theater I found that I was still very much emotionally wrapped up in the film, which for me is always a good sign.

I can’t in good conscience unconditionally recommend this movie, it’s simply not going to be for everyone. It’s intense, slow, often confusing and emotionally difficult. But if you, like me, enjoy being stripped down to the last nerve ending and having your brain muddled about with for a few hours, then I can say that this is something you should check out.