Directed by Martin Scorsese
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Most likely, those who had already seen the trailer for Scorsese’s latest film, Shutter Island, couldn’t help feeling there was something terribly wrong with it. Since his Cape Fear, a major box office hit, nothing looked that conventional in Scorsese’s filmography. It was clearly a mystery film, involving two federal agents (Leonardo Di Caprio and Mark Ruffalo) on a gloomy island, who were supposed to investigate the disappearance of a patient – undoubtedly, cheap film material. But everybody knows trailers lie: a trailer of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist made it look like a suspenseful thriller. It’s somehow obvious that a trailer usually can (and does) speed the plot, making a film sometimes more dynamic than it actually is. Ant that’s precisely how Shutter Island looked like: fast and darkish. Peculiarly enough, it seems that that’s exactly how the audiences want a Scorsese film, if we’re judging by the number of ticket buyers who made Shutter Island another box office hit, grossing more than any other film in the last days. Eventually, the film was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, out of the competition, and it became more credible, although, with Scorsese winning an Academy Award for his The Departed in 2007 and an honorary prize for his whole career at this year’s Golden Globes, it’s arguably if a Scorsese film needs any more credibility. Whatever the stakes, it wasn’t anymore about his career, as in the late seventies, or about his prestige, as some have thought watching his otherwise successful Cape Fear, in 1991. More or less, what everybody was curious about is Scorsese’s directing skills: was he still able to deliver another classic film, or he should just stick to restoring other’s classic films?
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Well, the answer to that question will have to be postponed, as Shutter Island is something less than a superior genre film and more of an attempt to deconstruct a certain genre. Of course, in order to label it in any way, you’ll have to wait until the very end, as Shutter Island is not short of surprise conclusions, more or less obvious, depending on the audience. When the mystery is eventually solved, things are more than just hard to define. The story, you’ve seen it elsewhere; on the other hand, Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, upon which the script of the film is based, is obviously written with awareness for the reader’s lack of faith in easily-figured mysteries. Each in their own way, Lehane and Scorsese tried to undermine a certain genre, that they were apparently faithful to. Lehane’s book is supposed to be and ironic composition of pulp, detective novel and gothic novel, all subverted by 21st century sensibilities. Scorsese himself hardly resisted to adding his own footnotes to the original plot: one of the first sequences, depicting the two agents driven into the fortress is clearly a nod to Kubrick’s The Shining. It’s not only about nods and footnotes, though: hearing one of the characters talking about the strange experiments happening on Shutter Island, experiments that make people act against their own will and become merely a tool into the hands of the one that program them, who doesn’t think about Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, or some other conspiracy-driven film of the sixties? Scorsese does a lot into that aspect for those who are willing to believe they’re watching a revisionist version of a paranoid thriller, adding bizarre characters (among them, a presumably Nazi doctor, played by the legendary Max von Sydow), showing each time how the detectives are being discreetly put under permanent surveillance and using all the available stereotypes (in one of the sequences, for instance, as Di Caprio’s character rushes out of a house, he turns and notices that the hospital's chief psychiatrist is carefully examining him from a distance). In the end, nevertheless, a lot of these gene elements turn out to be red herrings, as the truth is eventually revealed.
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It’s obvious that Scorsese’s building a double-layered story, not without proper warning for those careful enough to listen. Shutter Island is built as any good modern detective story, revealing to the reader/ viewer as much details as it actually hides. If we get back to the trailer, we would notice that in the trailer the note detective Teddy Daniels finds in the disappeared woman’s room says „Who is 67?”, while in the film, the note has two lines written on it, one with the same „Who is 67?” and the other one with a mysterious phrase, „Law of Four”. It’s quite obvious then that Scorsese wants to leave behind as many landmarks as he can in the plot, so the viewer can replay the story once the mystery is solved. That’s why it’s easy to notice how different can the story evolve at various moments: sometimes it speeds up, as the two detectives walk through the fort, and we perceive often merely snapshots of the surrounding reality, while it slows down when it comes to dialogue, of course, often filled with clues about what’s actually going on. Sadly, the film has less than a few memorable lines, as the conversations revolve obsessively around the same motifs, but Scorsese obviously cares more about the structure than about smart dialogue in the viewer’s quest for the truth. In the end, it comes down to one’s indulgence towards last-minute revelations, but undoubtedly Shutter Island is a powerful example of virtuosity concerning how much you can hide and leave in the open in the same time for a mystery story that has been previously been told.
