Asylum seekers
Every couple of decades, like a particularly undermotivated werewolf, Martin Scorsese experiences a transformation. He is rare among esteemed living auteurs in drawing equally on the influences of high and low culture but, at certain junctures in his career, he wallows in outright trashiness. It happened in 1972 with his second feature film, Boxcar Bertha, and again nearly 20 years later with a version of J Lee Thompson's Cape Fear that felt like a tawdry exercise in Hitch-schlock. Naturally, that became his highest-grossing release at that point, and it can't be a coincidence that Shutter Island, his newest "trash for cash" venture, has already enjoyed similar success in the US. Scorsese is back, and this time it's impersonal.
Shutter Island opens in the early 1950s with a ferry emerging from the fog, an image intended to foreshadow the audience's own passage from bewilderment to illumination. On board are two US marshals, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo). Their destination is a remote psychiatric hospital, which could be the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous (from Mel Brooks's Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety) in all but name. Teddy and Chuck are investigating the escape (or, as Teddy says, "ickscape") of a female patient who murdered her children. The creep-o-meter is cranked up to ten: zombie-like patients tend the gardens; Dr Cawly (Ben Kingsley) speaks in eerily reassuring tones; the mysterious "Ward C" is off-limits. And that's even before the marshals encounter Max von Sydow listening to Mahler in a wing-backed chair.
Teddy has enough demons of his own to populate an entire wing of the hospital. His memories of liberating Dachau keep interrupting the present tense in a monstrous slide show. Then there is his wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), who was killed in a blaze at the couple's apartment. "It was the smoke that got her, not the fire," he tells Chuck, then adds bizarrely: "So that's important." Then, perhaps as a sick joke, he requests a cigarette.
Dolores materialises intermittently to warn Teddy to leave the island, and while dream sequences are a rum convention under any circumstances, the examples here, at least, provide Scorsese with the chance for some flamboyantly rich imagery, such as a shot of Dolores turning to ash in Teddy's embrace. These episodes are a balm for the eyes in a film where the look is predominantly Gothic and windswept; this is clearly a production on which teams of tree shakers, leaf blowers and rat wranglers never got a minute's rest.
Unfortunately, the dream sequences begin taking over the asylum less than halfway into the film, with the result that everything we see and hear is rendered provisional. It takes a lot to keep an audience onside when the action's basic temporal and spatial certainties have been stripped away, and in throwing in its lot with hallucinations, Shutter Island suffers huge losses in suspense. The script, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from Dennis Lehane's novel, becomes burdened with exposition, which feels all the more clunky for being conveyed in an atmosphere of hysteria. A scene can be cut loose from reality, or it can divulge important plot points, but it can't do both - unless it's a special case, like the TV drama Twin Peaks.
DiCaprio has matured into a fine, almost grizzled leading actor with a deep furrow between his eyebrows in which you could park a bicycle. He's almost too intense for this daft pulp material: his torment is already so deep that Teddy's mental deterioration is barely felt. (It's as though DiCaprio looked to his stiff, pinched fedora for acting tips.) The film has confidence to spare - it's there in Robert Richardson's brooding cinematography, and in a driving score pieced together (by Robbie Robertson) from largely abrasive classical cuts.
But even if you don't see the final-reel twist coming, there is no satisfaction in discovering that things are even bleaker than you supposed. Personally, I harbour a lingering fondness for Mike Barker's Best Laid Plans, a 1999 thriller that hinged on a last-minute switcheroo of extraordinary gentleness. That film never found much favour; I guess "No one really died after all" is one of those headlines, like "Peace breaks out" and "Footballer settles down", that frustrates our appetite for bad tidings.
