Losing the plot

Rating: 3/10 (13 July 2010)

This could have been a good film, a great one even. The ingredients are all here. An imaginative director, wonderful location and sets, actors that are never less than competent and sometimes a lot better (I was particularly struck by Ruffalo, an actor I've not previously taken notice of). There is a promising premise – an Alcatraz of Hannibal Lecters, the island asylum where they send everyone that nobody else wants or can cope with. And potentially great themes; the excesses of American psychiatry in the early fifties, the disputes between the advocates of surgery, the advocates of medication, and the advocates of therapy. And something even darker still, something touching on the character of evil (or what we call evil) itself. Can someone be driven mad simply by witnessing too much? But the film bungles it, horribly. And it's not too hard to work out why. The script just isn't good enough. Actually, not even the script; the plot is not good enough. To be fair, I may have been in a good mood, and the film engaged my attention throughout. It's only afterwards, thinking about what you've just seen, that it all starts to come apart.
I think I can do this without spoilers. The basic premise is on the DVD sleeve. DiCaprio plays a US marshal (with his sidekick Ruffalo) who is called in to investigate the disappearance of a patient (which ought to be impossible). The procedural development I found, though stolid, gripping; and the creeping realisation that there is more here than meets the eye was well handled and well timed.
But what is really going on here? Several theories are discussed, and the truth when it finally emerges is certainly a twist of sorts, though it may well be one that the viewer has already thought of. (No prizes here. Night Shyamalam has a lot to answer for. Not every twist has to be like the one in the Sixth Sense. Sometimes, the most enjoyable and effective twist is the one that the viewer can work out, because it's the one that flatters the viewer's intelligence). But whatever sort of twist this is, it has to work. It has to make sense; and in this film, it doesn't.
It is another of those preposterous conspiracies that only work in fiction. The plot appears to work, in that it makes sense of the puzzles that precede it, and seems consistent enough with everything that has happened. But you realise, turning it over in your mind, that from the point of view of the conspirators, it is a completely mad plot. There is much too much that could go wrong, at every stage.
There are plenty of examples of this absurdity in the other reviews, some with spoilers, some without. Some I'd spotted for myself, others I ruefully recognised, and they all contributed to this sense of everything unravelling, of the whole plot falling apart in your hands. I will just add one myself: The film opens with a pallid DiCaprio sea-sick in the heads of the ferry taking him and his assistant to the island. My question (which will make sense to those who've seen the film, but will seem odd to those that haven't) is: what was DiCaprio doing five minutes before? More importantly, what was he thinking? That isn't a stupid question, either, as we subsequently learn quite a lot about what he is thinking, mostly in dreams and memories. DiCaprio discovers, patting his pockets, that he's lost his cigarettes, and accepts one from his assistant. Think, man! Where could you have left them? The realisation dawns on you that this whole conspiracy is a trick played not on or by DiCaprio on or by other characters. It is a trick played by the director on you, the viewer.
And with that, the film falls apart. We know that amongst the memories haunting DiCaprio are the fact that he was part of the contingent that liberated Dachau. The mentally ill (or "defective") were though fewer as disgraceful a part of Nazi extermination programmes as the Jews, and there are clear parallels that could be drawn here with the American programme of psychosurgery (though note that the island asylum's staff includes – I won't say who – representatives of the humanitarian as well as surgical and pharmaceutical wings of psychiatry). But this film, a shoddily assembled comic book plot, just cheapens and demeans these historical resonances.
It leaves me feeling quite angry. The film must have cost tens of millions . As my opening remarks say, the talent and the resources are all there. It's just so lazy, so slapdash. Is there no quality control? There's forty, fifty amateur critics or more on this site, each of whom could have told the producers and director what was going wrong. How could this mess get made?