I generally find Madhouse movies pretty boring. The fact that they deal in insanity, hallucination and denial usually means there are no graspable handholds in their stories. You can't trust what your eyes are seeing and you can never trust what the characters are saying, only not in an interesting way like in noir movies. Anything goes in a Madhouse movie and the filmmakers can always plead insanity and get off the hook. Madhouse movies almost always feature the same central character, the seemingly sane man/woman set adrift suddenly from their former world of order and control. They are constantly asking themselves the question, "Am I going crazy?" and the answer is always "yes". There's nothing to figure out. I usually just hold on, discounting everything from the first 2 acts until the lengthy explanation is trotted out--the rare psychological disorder, the split personalities, the dissociative condition that allowed for the plot to leap over its own holes. They all seem to inflate their running times with red-herrings that are meant to distract you along the journey to a destination you always should know is coming.
Shutter Island is no different than other Madhouse movies, but its pedigree tricks you into thinking it will be, and this works against the movie greatly. The disappointment the films final act engenders is directly in proportion to the talent and reputation of those involved. Every moment of the film, with its top-flight production values, lush photography and playfully assured direction seems to be telling you that you're in the hands of a master. So when you're finally delivered into territory that so many b-movie hacks have already journeyed to, it intensifies the letdown. The only difference is that it took much longer to get there, as the films running time seems to echo the expectations of its prestigious package. Scorsese gets the best of everything here, what he does with it ultimately, is retrace the steps of others, instead of blazing a new path.
I've never had a thing for Scorsese. It's not that I don't think he deserves his reputation, its just that none of his movies have connected with me personally the way other films from his peers have. I don't have a favorite Scorsese movie, like I do a DePalma or a Spielberg. Because of this I never bring much personal expectation into a Scorsese movie, and the same was true with Shutter Island. In fact, based on my reactions to the premise and trailer, I came in with low expectations and most of my viewing benefited from that. While I allowed myself to be tricked, I did feel like I was in the hands of a master, and for a time I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Here Scorsese seems to be indulging the film historian in him, playing with old movie conventions and evoking the feel of a bygone era. As soon as the movie begins, a purposely overwrought score pounds on each frame, the same way that old black and white movies tend to open with a blaring musical motif meant to communicate the intended tone. The tone in Shutter Island is dread, and an army of horns bellow while violins trill, working at your nerves before anything actually nerve-wracking has happened yet. This purposefully heavy hand is actually one of the things I liked about the initial tone of the movie.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffallo play US Marshals assigned to the case of a woman who has gone missing from Shutter Island, a high security mental institution that is so spooky and foreboding that it seems like the worst place to send people wrestling with mental demons. There's hardly any point in describing more about the plot or characters since it's clear, even from the trailer, that they are not to be trusted. The "twist" reveals the true purpose of these elements, which are to distract you from what you suspected (or flat out knew) in the first place. By virtue of the sub-genre (see Madhouse movies) Scorsese is working in here, I already had to ask myself in the first five minutes whether Leo was in fact a US Marshall at all, or just another looney patient. But again, the stature of Scorsese, his bottomless film knowledge and gigantic budget led me to believe that more was at work here. I think I had the same reaction as many, "surely they aren't doing what I think they're going to do?" They did. It's a perplexing decision from a "master" since it affirms audience expectations rather than subverting them. It also renders most of the movie a tedious game that has little or no value after one viewing. To call it a "twist" is practically an insult to twists really. M. Night Shyamalan probably had a shit when he saw it. "That's it?That's their twist?".
Maybe it seems unfair or narrow to focus most of my attention on the twist and its ineffectiveness, but I really think it guts the whole experience. Spending the whole movie telling myself, "nah, they wouldn't be so lame" and then finding out they are really overshadows any of the positives I may have responded to. Perhaps it's that Scorsese, while playing with old movie conventions and dipping into the Madhouse subgenre, was also trying to pay homage, and therefore didn't want to break with tradition. His unsurprising surprise and leaden epilogue filled with backstory and extraneous explanation suggests that he wanted to color inside the lines of the Madhouse movie. But I don't buy it. Even though its clear that Shutter Island is nothing more than a spooky asylum movie, it never fully concedes to this. There are far too many flashbacks to WW2 atrocities and Holocaust death camps to ever mistake this for a straight-up chiller. And when the film spends the final 30 minutes wallowing in the bleak origins of Leo's madness, any fun is sucked out and replaced with dead children, method crying and plenty of screaming to the heavens. The movie always has one foot holding the door open to respectability and it deflates the punch of its borrowed B-movie elements. With all this Oscar-baiting material, its hard to believe that Scorsese was merely shooting for an homage to spooky b-movies.
DiCaprio has spent most of the last decade allowing himself to be miscast, throwing his method weight behind characters his frame can't support. I mostly understand why he makes his choices, smartly avoiding comic book movies and other bullshit. But playing cops, mercenaries and other assorted hard guys just doesn't work for him. He's become a prestige picture player, but he's almost always wrong for the specific roles he takes and his US Marshall/Mental Patient in Shutter Island is no different. It's not that DiCaprio isn't good, he almost always is, its just that it always takes a good 20 minutes or more to get over the Leo-factor and buy him as whatever character he's brooding through. He would be much better suited to model-fucking millionaire playboy roles (one half of The Aviator I suppose) and would do well to stay away from anything that requires him to shout with a gun in his hand.
I generally like when Scorsese strays away from mobsters, violent machismo and New York. The Scorsese movies I like the best (After Hours, King of Comedy, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence) are the ones that break from the styles and subjects that made him a film snob favourite. Shutter Island is Scorsese doing horror-of-the-mind and there isn't even a single Rolling Stones song on the soundtrack. While I think he should be commended for playing outside his comfort zone, the results are underwhelming and fall short of a director who has been given the mantle of a master.
