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Fight claustrophobia, stick with ‘Shutter Island’

By Sean Meehan, Gavel Media Senior Staff, on February 22, 2010 2:20 AM

By Sean Meehan, Video Editor – (Photo courtesy of famousmonstersoffilmland.com)

Unless you were lucky enough to catch Shine a Light, the film world has heard very little from Martin Scorsese since 2006. That would be the year that he brought us The Departed, which is considered to be a sort of classic for any Boston-area college student. So, aside from his documentary on the Rolling Stones and a few short films, where’s Marty now? Well, he’s actually still in Boston, and still working with his post-DeNiro muse Leonoardo DiCaprio, so setting and protagonist are similar in his latest flick Shutter Island. But that’s about the extent of the connection between the two films – Shutter Island is a tense and chill¬ing piece, and even manages to keep its f-word count in the double digits.

It’s hard to forget the opening sequence of The Departed: starting with stock footage of the harsh realities of Boston’s streets and then hurling us into a few short vignettes of Frank Costello and Sergeant Sullivan’s first encoun¬ters, we’ve sort of been rocketed face first into the thick of things. Not to mention that the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” accompanies it all – it’s almost glorious. With Shut¬ter Island, we get the polar opposite. Nothing more than slow paced ex¬positional dialog on the deck of a ferry headed for the über ominous island off the coast of Boston that we’ve been told houses many of the most dangerous criminally in¬sane offenders in the country. From there, we learn about how U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) have been sent to Shutter Island to investigate the escape of a patient. Not much else is necessary to describe the plot of this film, but rest assured it’s got the standard twists, turns and weird dream sequences that belong in this sort of genre.

Typically a review would begin here with the good, but in the case of this film, working in a different order is more appropriate. Let it be said that the first 15 minutes appear downright sloppy, from both a screenwriting and techni¬cal perspective. The two marshalls gab on about what the island is housing, why they’re there, as well as telling us (fairly directly) that these two officials have never worked together before and that’s (wait for it …) a big problem. From a technical perspective, and this is most certainly a nitpick, but the use of green screen and chroma key in this opening sequence is so blatant and poorly executed that it was distracting for this reviewer. Needless to say, this flick had a large and steep hill to climb up to redeem itself.

What is so fascinating about the film is that, despite all odds, the film claws its way back ferociously throughout the rest of the film, constantly elevating itself to higher and higher standards. This review would turn into spoiler-central if it were to go into how precisely it manages to come back from the abyss, but let it be known that those aforementioned gripes about the issues in the first 15 minutes are addressed and actually more or less justified by the time that the credits roll. In that sense, Shutter Island has a sort of novel feature going for it in that it plays with the conventions and clichés of films of this genre and uses them to inform the story later on. I’m not saying that all of this was totally intentional on the part of the filmmakers (movies like this end up with a lot of “justifying” plotholes and problems just because the story is supposed to be a bit of a puzzle), but I’m inclined to think that someone like Scorsese wouldn’t let some of these major faux pas slide unless he felt it was warranted.

Like most Scorsese pictures, it oozes style on every frame, and it’s very refreshing to watch so many of his “Scorsese-isms” crop up in interesting ways throughout the film’s 138-minute runtime. To equate this movie to a piece of technology, it’s a lot like the first generation iPhone. You can tell that a lot of very talented people went into the making of this thing that most certainly has some prob¬lems, but I just can’t help but enjoy myself with it, and I’ll probably be called a fanboy for liking it too. 8.0/10