Shudder Island

Going to the movies nowadays is kind of like playing Let’s Make a Deal, that old American TV game show in which people try to guess what’s behind door number one, two or three. Could be a great prize (“A new car!”) or it could be someone holding the leash of a goat.

That’s kind of how I felt lining up to see Shutter Island, the misbegotten Martin Scorsese flick starring Leonardo DiCaprio, knowing that Kick-Ass was playing in an adjacent cinema. I kind of knew I was picking the goat, but I went ahead and opened the door anyway.

Shutter Island may be one of the worst movies of the year, but it would have been a contender last year, too, had its release not been delayed by studio concerns about its eminent crappiness. Still, it was number one in the US box office for a couple weeks, and was the highest opening-gross flick for Scorsese, owing much to the appeal of his previous team-up with DiCaprio in The Departed.

That movie was fresh and kinetic; in comparison, watching Shutter Island is like slipping into a bad David Lynch Rohypnol daydream. Taking place in a mental institution for the criminally insane set offshore Massachusetts, Shutter Island is the kind of nightmare you just can’t wake up from. Of course, there’s always the cinema exit, but going to the movies isn’t cheap nowadays; when you spend upwards of P180 a pop to watch something, even if you picked the wrong door, you don’t want to throw in the towel.

One of the problems with Shutter Island, based on yet another novel by Dennis Lehane, is that DiCaprio isn’t particularly good at playing a man. He’s always had the boyish thing going for him, but even in The Departed (Scorsese’s lurid remake of a Japanese cop thriller), DiCaprio’s strength was his youthful vulnerability. We felt for him because he seemed in over his head, and justifiably pissed off. Here he plays a US Marshal (or, since he’s from Boston, “a Yew-Ess Mahshall”) named Teddy Daniels, riding a ferry to the aforementioned mental institution with his partner (Mark Ruffalo, looking mostly bored). In the opening scenes, Leo’s clothes seem to hang off him two sizes too small. How are we to believe he is a tough US Marshall, out to uncover what happened to an escaped mental patient? He barely fits into his clothes. Naturally, all this searching for an escaped patient turns out to be a red herring; in fact, there are enough red herrings floating around for the movie to be called “Chowder Island.”

Leo is haunted by many things: his memories of liberating a concentration camp during WWII (the story takes place in the 1950s), his wife (Michelle Williams) being burned up in a fire at a lake house, not to mention a bad mini-beard and some serious frown lines creasing his brow. On top of that, he’s picked up some of Jack Nicholson’s mannerisms and speech patterns, no doubt from working with The Joker Himself on The Departed. But Leo is no Jack in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And even with the cocked hat, he’s no Jake Gittes in Chinatown. Despite giving it his emo best, DiCaprio can’t lift Teddy’s tortured (torturous?) tale above the level of pulp.

And maybe that’s exactly what Scorsese was aiming for. He’s gone pulpy before, remaking the ‘50s noir B-movie Cape Fear (with Bernard Hermann’s original torrid soundtrack to boot), casting Robert De Niro in the over-the-top role that would hasten his cinematic decline all the way down to The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. (Honestly, since Max Cady, can you ever really take Bob De Niro seriously?)

And it’s always a mixed blessing when Ligeti music shows up in a movie — it’s a signal that you’ve either entered truly creepy Overlook Hotel territory, or you’re about to suffer the smirk-inducing single-note theme that made Eyes Wide Shut so risible. Both types of Ligeti music are involved here, as is Mahler (for pure schlock value), Penderecki and John Cage. The soundtrack (compiled by Robbie Robertson) is intrusive, exhausting, pretentious.

Maybe Shutter Island could have used a real villain, instead of the ever-present, ever-bald Ben Kingsley (as pipe-smoking shrink Dr. Cawley). God knows the film could have used about 15 minutes sliced from its incoherent, labyrinthine length.

About the point where Leo happens upon Patricia Clarkson living in a cave or Ted Levine as the asylum’s warden asks Leo what he would do if someone tried to chew his eyeball out, I was ready to cry “Uncle.”

But here Scorsese — whose fingerprints are on every movie he makes — seems more interested in lighting gloomy cliffsides, à la Hitchcock classics such as Rebecca and Vertigo, than art or coherence. Unfortunately, Shutter Island doesn’t even rise to the B-level Hitchcock of Spellbound, which also takes place in a loony bin, though Scorsese does borrow a shot — the panning gun-point-of-view shot — from that Gregory Peck-Ingrid Bergman film. In short, it seems like an empty exercise from the man who gave us Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

And so what, some people might counter. Shouldn’t Scorsese be allowed to do a movie “just for fun” once in a while? Okay, but the fact is, he’s been artistically coasting since the large-scale debacle of Gangs of New York. Unfortunately, another GoodFellas-level renaissance may be too much to ask for at this point.

Instead, Shutter Island belongs to that peculiar school of films that exists only to eff with the audience’s mind — in a Jacob’s Ladder/Angel Heart kind of way, though not nearly as fun or memorable. It’s a bad trip from the get-go, with all the B-movie bells and whistles going off at once — dark and stormy night, crazy-looking patients, gloomy lighthouses, things that go bump in the night. But it’s the images bedeviling US Marshal Daniels that will really make you want to flee the theater. When the first hallucination/bad dream kicks in (Michelle Williams in a room raining down black ash, her guts bleeding, water flowing through her hands, her back disintegrating in flame) I immediately asked my wife Therese, “What the eff’s up with this movie?” Turns out I really didn’t want to know.

Indeed, watching Shutter Island actually made me want to go home and instead watch the final downloaded episodes of Lost, that other looney tune experience set on an island where nothing makes sense. At least that mind-frak wouldn’t make my head hurt so much.