• 
• 

Scorcese's Shutter Island Opens

There are plenty of themes in Berlin at this year's festival, the 60th anniversary of the annual event, but one that recurs - mostly like a nightmare - is that of the institution, the prison.
Shutter Island by Martin Scorsese, the most carefully monitored film at the festival for its world premiere, is set in 1954 in a hospital for the criminally insane on an island in Boston Harbor. It's a rough trip there under any circumstances, as we see when Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo set out by boat.  They are FBI agents, investigating the disappearance of an inmate. Of course, they're trapped, and the story flips into something altogether different.
If the dark-and-stormy-night weather weren't unsettling enough, there's a sense of foreboding when the guards of the imposing brick complex warn the agents of the rules of the island that even the FBI must to obey. Then they meet the warden, Ben Kingsley, and you immediately get the message from his British accent and camp commander demeanor that any sense of realism here is going to be overwhelmed by drama and style, and by the sheer grandness of the project. Think of it as an opera or symphony in its sheer scale and in the demands that it aspires to place on your emotions.   
Unlike Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's neighborhood thriller adapted from the novel by the writer of Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane, this film takes you far beyond Boston.  This isn't The Departed. It's a world unto itself, a multi-leveled hell of movie lore.
The soundtrack is crucial here, especially because it's not in keeping with a period film. Music by Krzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti, John Cage, and John Adams isn't just dissonant, it's cerebral. It's not only telling you that the world in this brick healing and correctional institutional is more fractured than the exteriors indicate. There's something going on inside these walls and inside these characters, and it's going to get inside you.
Bear in mind that this is from the man who brought you Travis Bickle's fantasies in Taxi Driver.
If that weren't clear enough from the story, the music sounds as if something's being pried open.
It takes you back to horror films from as early as the 20's classic the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Once again, Scorsese is the encyclopedic cinephile.
The only thing missing in this horror thriller is the dissecting table - I did mention that the investigation and the music are prying open something sinister. That table here is the editing booth, and a whole range of films are being taken apart and assembled into this one.
Shutter Island puts you off balance - there seems to be a clear motivation for what DiCaprio;s character is doing  as a former shell-shocked WW2 veteran (who shot Germans after they surrendered at a Nazi death camp) now trying to find the man who allegedly killed his wife (Michelle Williams) by burning down the family's house. Then you find that we don't' know what really happened, and the elaborate structure of history from World War II to CIA Cold War brain experiments on the island might not be pointing to what you think.  I won't give it away. Let's say it ends up as a nightmarish drama in DiCaprio's head.
Scorsese doesn't take you there through special effects - this isn't Avatar or Lord of the Rings -- but through script, music and the design of an emotional gothic landscape where even the weather and the rocks act in opposition to the agents who probe the island's secrets. It's melodramatic, fright-crazy and stylish.
At times the interiors of the asylum buildings look like places you could only see in a movie, unless you're around 19th century dungeons and oubliettes. (Think of the underground chambers in the Gangs of New York.) The reality of the setting isn't what counts here, but the reality of your emotions.
The 1950's have been called the Age of Anxiety (by W. H.  Auden), for the horror of the era's politics. But ultimately his film is more about cinema than about the horrors of mental asylums or about the politics of the day. As with Inglorious Basterds, Shutter Island ends up being less frightening than you might have expected because have more to do with the world of movies than they do with the world itself.
Scorsese didn't take his cast through the old institutions of Massachusetts for them to see what the places were like. Yet he did show them classics like Laura, Out of the Past and Vertigo to acquaint them with the cinema of the time.  
Ultimately Shutter Island becomes more about its director making a film than about anything during The Age of Anxiety. The movie shows its seams, quite deliberately, because it's about film as an infrastructure. We see Scorsese working as an architect rather than as a magician. And the emotional experience that you have  evolves into a preoccupation about how the craftsman is going to put it all together again - there's an emotional first hour, and then puzzlement about resolution takes over after that.  
Indulge your appetite for movie nostalgia, and Shutter Island just might work.

Add Comment