 "Photo: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures")
After you win an Academy Award, your next film is really yours to choose. But a caution to winners, please make your follow up film a good one.
After winning the Best Director Oscar for “The Departed” (2006), Martin Scorsese decided to adapt the Dennis Lehane novel, “Shutter Island.”
Although Scorsese’s visual style is very intact, it can’t make up for the other faults in this uneven picture.
Set in the 1950’s, Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Teddy Daniels, a hard nosed, U.S. Marshall from Boston, who is sent to an island hospital to investigate a disappearance. But it’s not any old hospital, “it’s a mental hospital for the criminally insane.”
As Daniels and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) continue their investigation they notice something is amiss. The islands chief psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) is giving them a hard time, the guards are misleading them and one of the island’s top physicians (Max von Sydow) is playing mind games with them. The island is isolated from the outside world and Daniels becomes as one character says, “a rat in a maze.”
The film is in some ways a departure from Scorsese’s previous films. Having made some of the greatest films of all time, such as “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas,” you would think a director of this caliber could stay sharp with any genre he tackles. But this film is a little off and really seems inappropriate for Scorsese.
The film definitely stays true to Lehane’s pulp novel. It keeps the same attitude and is big thriller. But as it starts as a thriller, it slowly morphs into a psychological character study of DiCaprio’s character. Daniels was a World War II veteran seeing Holocaust horrors and his wife and daughter died in a fire years earlier. So there is definitely some baggage to the main character.
You would think with a premise like this and the film would be golden. Not to mention the cast featuring DiCaprio, Ruffalo, Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson. It’s a cavalcade of amazing actors, but unfortunately that is not enough to save the film.
The film did not really seem like a challenge for Scorsese to attack. His visual sense is there, but there is no emotional core. We see DiCaprio’s characters background, but this is used more as a tool for the thriller opposed to an emotional core.
It seems like Scorsese took on this film to show himself he could do it. I’m not calling this film the worst thing ever, but I honestly saw no reason for it to be made.
“Shutter Island” is a definite disappointment. With so much going for it, including and A-list director, a top-notch cast and plot. But the film falls flat and relies too much on the mindbender of the thriller. Scorsese needs to take his time and pick his next project carefully.
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