Shutter Island (4/5 Stars) February 24, 2010

A heartbreaking study of staggering sadness.

Teddy Daniels fought in the Second World War. He was there when the Allies liberated Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp. He saw the emaciated shrunken faces of the prisoners. He walked past frozen piles of murdered corpses, too many to count. Him and some of the other American soldiers took the German soldiers stationed there, stood them up against a wire fence, and shot them execution style. It wasn’t warfare. It was murder and Teddy knew it. Teddy came home and married a woman he dearly loved. Their marriage was strained. One day she found a closet full of whiskey flasks. She asked him why he drank so much in a compassionate and worried voice. “I killed a lot of people in the war,” he replied throat full of guilt and sorrow. Teddy witnessed cruel random tragedy twice. His wife died from smoke inhalation when a pyromaniac set fire to their apartment building. He has dreams of her almost every night. They embrace in mercy and forgiveness and then she burns up from within and turns into ashes in his arms. He is left alone grasping the air around him.

Such is the background of the U.S. Marshall (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) who is investigating the disappearance of a patient at an insane asylum for the criminally insane in Martin Scorsese’s newest movie Shutter Island. The trailers suggest that this movie is from the horror genre but don’t be mistaken, this is out and out film noir and it fits in perfectly with its time period, the Golden Age of Film Noir, the early 1950s. 

The plot twists and turns so much that I feel compelled to leave most of it out of my review simply because I would probably need to see the movie again just to make sure I have it right. In the end though, the plot itself is just a red herring. The real story here is in the character development. When Martin Scorsese won his first Oscar for the The Departed he joked that it was the first movie he had made that had a plot. He’s back to his old ways in an ingeniously disguised way. 

But what do I mean that this isn't a horror film. Well, in your regular horror film the criminally insane (like say Hannibal Lector or Mike Myers) are explained just enough to completely freak you out. Here, the crazy people are explained to the point where you really really understand why they’ve gone crazy. Instead of being afraid of them, you empathize with them. And let me tell you, it takes some serious trauma to become criminally insane. Keep in mind that Teddy Daniels is the sane one in this story. Everyone other patient (including the 67th) has gone through worse. One place where this really shows is in the casting. The woman who went missing was guilty of drowning her three children. She isn’t played by a deformed hag of a woman. Scorsese instead chose to cast Emily Mortimer, an actress who can easily play the ‘sweetest woman in the world’ roles (Lars and the Real Girl.) Filling in other supporting roles are inherently compassionate actors like Ben Kingsley (Ghandi, Schindler’s List), Michelle Williams (Synecdoche New York), and Mark Ruffalo (Eternal Sunshine). Scorsese doesn’t want to just scare us. He wants to break our hearts. 

Scorsese is a master at empathy. Watching his movies makes one grow as a person. He chooses perhaps the hardest possible characters to relate with and provides the viewer with an opportunity to sympathize and understand them. (A violent loner like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. An inarticulate brute like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Even someone as inhuman as Jesus Christ himself in The Last Temptation of Christ.) Here, he chooses the criminally insane as his muse. I can’t imagine any other filmmaker doing a better job. I heard that in the late 70s Scorsese was hospitalized with deep depression and apparently thought that Raging Bull would be the last movie he would make. I don’t know if that’s the cause, but it is certainly clear that this guy understands suffering inside and out. 

Film noir as a genre grew into popularity at a distinct time in American History. World War II had begun and ended. The Korean War, which is usually forgotten but killed thousands of Americans started just a few years later. The Soviet Union had just gotten the bomb and America was in full Red Scare mode. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder had yet to be identified but must have existed on a grand scale. Take a look at the classic film noir movies then: Hardboiled cynical men, untrustworthy women, nihilistic plots and gloomy photography. Everybody smoked and drank nonstop. This movie has the same dark feel to it. The mood is so encapsulating that at times I thought it would have worked better had it been shot in black and white. There’s an especially cool cinematic trick Scorsese used in the dream sequences to give it an eerier than usual feel. Pay special attention to the cigarette smoke. It seems to be going in reverse sucked back into the cigarette. I can’t wait for this guy’s next movie.

Gran Torino (4/5 Stars) 01/02/09

Ladies and Gentlemen the Comedy Stylings of Clint Eastwood! You know someone is aging gracefully when he can fill an entire movie with old man jokes. Clint mutters, spits, and snarls over how kids are these days, his stupid family, and the new neighbors next door. Almost every sentence there is a racial epithet or an insult. You can get away with that when you're super old. You've lived too long to give a damn about what people who haven't lived as long as you think. He throws his son out of the house when he suggests moving to a retirement community. He tells his Asian neighbors to stay away from his dog. He spits near his granddaughter when she expresses his interest in his 74' Gran Torino. He spends his days taking care of his house and sitting on the porch smoking and downing Pabst Blue Ribbons. In short, this is the sort of tough guy that Clint Eastwood made a career out of. Now he's taking that guy and creating a really good comic situation by surrounding him by Hmong immigrants at the twilight of his life. Sure the plot has a gang violence center to it and a lot of the drama concerns how Eastwood tries to man up an at risk boy named Thao, but what really struck me about this movie is how funny it is. There are more than a dozen great one-liners. A lot of the attention this movie is getting for Eastwood is not unfounded. Watching I cannot imagine anyone else pulling off as good a performance. And that's not just because there's nobody left Eastwood's age that has good enough health to do it. Actually I take that back. One of the reasons this character is cool is because he's so old and still has so much life in him. When an elder tells a teenager to stop being such a pussy and calls a young priest a virgin with no life experience I knew I was watching something special.
The movie is also important in how it deals with the gang plot. In a usual Eastwood movie, say Unforgiven, you would expect the whole thing to end with a shootout. That doesn't happen here although the possibility of one is definitely foreshadowed. It does go to show that in the twilight of his career Eastwood is making an amends with the vigilante spirit he created with his wild west and dirty harry films. In this movie there is a respect for the avenues of law enforcement weird as that may sound in an Eastwood pic.