Review: Shutter Island
I write on Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island mostly as an excuse to cross reference it to one of my favourite quotes I’ve encountered in my time spent reading film criticism. The author in question is NY Press’s noted contrarian Armond White, who wrote of Brian DePalma’s maligned 2000 sci-fi flop Mission to Mars that “It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone like them”. As declarations go it’s pretty deliciously outrageous, but it nevertheless says something important. I suggest to you that any reviewer who dismisses Shutter Island as one might dismiss Mission to Mars can similarly be said to not understand movies. Here’s why:
Most who dismiss the film will focus, not without reason, on the story, and the various narrative twists and turns. And it is true that on this account Shutter Island is pretty silly. The narrative is basically a shell game, and when people figure out they’re being fooled with, probably quite early, they’re going to get cranky. And the major turns, when they come, are going to get scoffed at, especially since the narrative logic that gets them there is tenuous at best. US Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule head to an isolated island, taken up entirely by an institution for the criminally insane, to find a missing girl. As Daniels’ troubled past rises to the fore, the line between sane and insane becomes blurred. You see where this is going. You can feel the filmmakers trying to get a two handed grip on the narrative, and for the most part the tone and intention is quite clear, but the tale itself has insurmountable logic and structural flaws.
The big issue is that Scorsese, a master filmmaker by anyone’s definition, has decided to employ all the bombast and trickery and playfulness he can muster at the service of what is essentially a weak story. And for people for whom the story is the most important element, who treat the cinema as little more than recorded theatre or literature – people who, in short, don’t really understand or like cinema – this is going to be a major discrepancy and an insurmountable flaw.
For the others, who know how to and enjoy engaging film on a purely formal level, it’s not such a big deal, particularly when Scorsese is just throwing big dripping gobs of pure cinema up on the screen like a guy having a seizure. It’s so much fun; just a series of punchy episodes organised around the central themes of memory, madness, and trauma. Scene to scene he‘s doing something different, and weird, and bizarrely affecting. From the strangely clunky opening dialogue scene, to the back-projection-like green screen effects he drops into otherwise normal location scenes, to the handful of gob smacking dream-sequences he pulls off, along with two or three achingly moving flashbacks, it’s pretty much a sensory feast. The formal elements that Scorsese is so good at, the kind of stuff he serves up here, is the essence of cinema, and it’s often too easy to forget that story, dialogue, ideology should be mostly secondary concerns.
I read Dennis Lehane’s book before I saw it. I’d recommend even just reading the wikipedia page. Remember: play along, don’t get played.
Paul Martin
08/03/10 - 9:57 PM
I was disappointed with the film, and enjoyed reading such a considered post that helps me to appreciate what I may have missed. If I see the film again one day, I’ll try to look at it from a different perspective.
jessie
09/03/10 - 1:42 PM
So, are you pretty much saying anyone who disagrees with you about this film is a moron?
James Douglas
09/03/10 - 5:47 PM
I hope not. I’m suggesting that people who dislike the film, even for what I feel to be valid reasons, might be missing some important things. The film still has a lot to recommend it, despite the obviously unsatisfying elements.
I also think that the things people aren’t noticing, or are disregarding, about the film illustrates a broader problem with film criticism and, to some extent, film viewership.
I’m not suggesting that everybody who dislikes the film is wrong, or stupid. I do set up a kind of straw man viewer in the article, and it is perfectly reasonable that people would dislike the film for reasons outside what I address in the piece.
So I think I’m saying all that. Only more aggressively.
Brad Nguyen
09/03/10 - 6:42 PM
I really like this review. For me, it’s easier to appreciate film on a purely formal level in a movie like this where narrative logic begins to fall apart, where the holes and disjunctures force you away from viewing the film in the literal way that most criticism advocates.
This is also the reason I can enjoy a film like “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen” but have no tolerance for a film like “Inglourious Basterds” even though Tarantino obviously has a greater command of cinematic language; because Tarantino’s formal prowess is enmeshed in the extremely problematic philosophy that informs the narrative. (I know you love Inglourious Basterds James!) Transformers 2 is such a mess that, for me, it can be appreciated as a poetic series of disconnected and ridiculous imagery. And it was all the more pleasurable because of it!
Conall Cash
09/03/10 - 7:35 PM
I wonder where Shutter Island fits according to that Transformers/Inglourious Basterds dichotomy – somewhere in between, clearly enough. As James has illustrated, there’s a great deal of formal complexity, or at least formal daring in this film, as in anything by Scorsese; and there is a rather frustrating, unsatisfying narrative (at least for most of us). So you could say it has the formal daring of the Tarantino and the narrative messiness of Transformers (not that I’ve seen it, but just playing along). But I think an important point to make is that Scorsese and everyone else involved in the film clearly believe in the strength and the power of the story they are telling; whatever we may think, I think it’s clear that Scorsese cares intensely about these more traditional, dramatic/literary qualities like story and character, and believes that the particular formal devices he uses serve to support that story (though at the same time a great deal of pleasure is clearly taken in the homages to other films, the appeal to old-fashioned cinematic devices, etc).
Now, intentional fallacy and all, I’m not suggesting this is a problem for James’ argument or that Scorsese’s intentions necessarily matter for our appreciation of the film, but I think it’s worth noting that when making this distinction between the ‘boring,’ dramatic elements and the ‘fun,’ formal elements of a film, it is not a distinction that can ever entirely hold, both because filmmakers rarely conceive of these things as completely separate, and because films just don’t function that way as we watch them – the two are always enmeshed.
jessie
10/03/10 - 11:15 PM
Thanks- I needed that clarification! Interesting discussion.
I enjoyed the film for some the same reasons you did (minues the terrible Magic Eye hallucination sequences), found the story a bit stupid, but I think it’s important to note that plenty of audience members, far from being cranky- seem to enjoy the shell game and experience Shutter Island roughly as “high level M Night Shayalaman”. I feel like it has been marketed that way, received that way, and I wonder to what extent Scorsese is playing on that too. I also agree that, contrary to a few reviews I’ve heard/read, I doubt Scorsese set out to make a film with a crap story.
I also have to say- where’s the line? Where’s the cut off? How many stupid movies does someone have to make before we stop making excuses?
Just askin’.
Gangs of New York…The Departed…Shutter Island…
I’ll get me coat….
Paul Martin
10/03/10 - 11:48 PM
Jessie, maybe we’re still waiting for Scorsese to make Taxi Driver Returns or Raging Bulls, Casino II, etc when he’s moved on to a different type of film. Maybe we don’t get his intentions, because we’re stuck on this idea of what he was about. I prefer the Scorsese of last millennium, but something tells me he’s gone and never coming back.
jessie
11/03/10 - 10:47 AM
That’s a fair enough call, and is partly what I mean- I’m not a huge fan of any of his films. I don’t hate him or anything, I recognise his significance etc. I just see it the same way I see Neil Young, or Bruce Springsteen or Elvis Costello: yeah, they’re still making music, people are still buying it. It’s technically proficient. They know what they’re doing. I don’t resent it’s existence, but is it anything to write home about?
Paul Martin
11/03/10 - 11:49 AM
Jessie, for me, no it’s not. I don’t see the point of The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Departed or Shutter Island. They’re all competent films, in their own way. But they offer me no reason to go see them, other than Scorsese’s name attached to them.
Conall Cash
15/03/10 - 3:18 AM
Danny Kasman has just published a terrific piece about this film, which complements James’ review and these comments interestingly:
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1524
Conall Cash
20/03/10 - 2:08 PM
Armond is at it again
http://www.nypress.com/article-21008-my-greenberg-problemmdashand-yours.html
Brad Nguyen
22/03/10 - 2:27 PM
Bitch is crazy.
Conall Cash
22/03/10 - 4:37 PM
He’s certainly unhinged a bit, but anyone who takes a swipe at Hoberman can’t be all bad. Hoberman’s own response is appalling: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/03/armond_white.php
Brad Nguyen
22/03/10 - 7:51 PM
Movieline has been following this which is the only way I know anything about it:
http://tinyurl.com/yfnut72
http://tinyurl.com/yjc9p72
This all seems to have started because Armond White didn’t get invited to a preview screening of Greenberg because he had called Noah Baumbach an asshole and said he should have been aborted.
Conall Cash
22/03/10 - 8:21 PM
That is all discussed in White’s article that I linked to. The thing about abortion is Hoberman’s rather creative rendering of something White wrote in a review of an earlier Baumbach film about ten years ago.
goran
23/03/10 - 8:41 PM
But the people who can engage with films and enjoy them on a purely formal level are the people who have seen a lot of films, including – hopefully – for example, Welles’ ‘The Trial’. In a movie like that – which is by no means literal or plot-driven – the formal aspects are staggering (and staggeringly, overwhelmingly impressive), but also conducive to meaning. You could tell Welles read and understood Kafka’s novel. Whereas with ‘Shutter Island’, I got the sense that Scorsese watched ‘The Trial’ 20 times, didn’t particularly understand what it’s about, but thought it was moody and cool, so he set out to make a bland textureless meaningless but infinitely more expensive rehash.
I don’t mind movies skimping on story, but I do very much mind it when they are skimping on productive character development and particularly on meaning. There are exceptions to this rule, of course: I won’t watch Indiana Jones (or really any other Harrison Ford movie, beyond maybe Witness) and scour for meaning or psychological insight. But for a movie as self-consciously solemn and shrouded in a veneer of dark macho profundity, Shutter Island is crushingly hollow.
All that said – I’m only writing this in response to the points you made, which I thought gave Scorsese too much credit (for three decades people have routinely been giving Scorsese way too much credit). I actually even enjoyed the film on a certain level. A bland rehash of The Trial is still preferable to a bland rehash of a Nicolas Cage movie. And what I really found exciting is watching a $100-million Hollywood budget being spent on something so abstract, and ambitious, and uncompromisingly, self-consciously (as well as, alas, pretentiously) arty. Even though it is unquestionably a failure, at least it’s an interesting failure, an ambitious failure (as opposed to, let’s say, a big-screen abortion starring The Rock).