Scorsese throws a curve ball; audience strikes out

Rating: 4/10 (24 February 2010)

Last year, I lamented the fact that Martin Scorsese's long-await psychological thriller "Shutter Island" was relegated to the dead movie month of February, especially when it was receiving serious Oscar buzz at the time.
Rumors floated about that the studio and Scorsese had come to a rift, that Marty wanted too much money, that he was being punished for being the most arrogant yet most talented director in the biz. Yep, as these stories flew, I sided 100 percent with Scorsese and felt he was being persecuted - once again.
Then I saw "Shutter Island." Now I know what the fuss wasn't all about.
If ever a motion picture needed to be seen in February this is it. As difficult to watch as it is to review, "Shutter Island" is a psychotropic mish-mash of "Shawshank Redemption" meets "Vertigo" meets "The Sixth Sense" meets "Inglourious Basterds" meets "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," all neatly wrapped up as an ode to Alfred Hitchcock but coming off as simply a nod to Brian DePalma.
Littered with weird visions, wild hallucinations, back-breaking plot twists and - unfortunately - scene after scene of dead children, this movie laps itself in confusion and covers itself with a thick layer of obfuscation leaving one shaking one's head and wondering just what the point of the entire enterprise was.
Now, no doubt, those who love this film will toss about accusations of the stupidity of this scribbler, that he has no clue about the nuances of the Dennis Lehane novel from which it came; or the depth of the emotional screenplay adaptation by Laeta Kalogridis (whose last major screenplay was the wonderful, historically-accurate "Pathfinder").
That being written, to me, this movie had so much potential - all of which was smashed to bits by heavy-handed direction, a punch-in-the-face musical score, dead-end plot lines and a mystery that Nancy Drew herself would have found far too easy to solve. Then, after the endless maze of twists and turns we're forced go through, the movie takes a lame swipe at McCarthyism - where was Charlie McCarthy when I needed him?
It's 1954 and U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo, "Where the Wild Things Are") arrive at a creepy federal asylum for the criminally insane off the coast of Massachuttes. Evidently, a young woman prisoner - who drowned her three children - escaped and they have been called in to investigate.
I write "evidently" because nothing is as it seems in this picture, but one will get used to that. Treated as intruders by the bellowing guards and like idiots by the high-toned doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow), the two marshals carry on their investigation, even though a "Jurassic Park"-like hurricane is threatening to overwhelm the entire island.
In the meantime, Teddy is having bizarre hallucinogenic nightmares featuring his wife, Delores (Michelle Williams, Oscar nominee for "Brokeback Mountain"), who perished in a fire set by a guy who is housed in this very facility. In these dreams, Delores keeps trying to give Teddy clues about the film, but he refuses to listen.
He also relates how, as a U.S. soldier liberating one of the Nazi death camps, he and others lined up German soldiers against the wall and machine-gunned them. I'm not sure why these scenes were in the movie, since they had nothing to do with the plot - then again, NOTHING in this movie had ANYTHING to do with the plot.
Teddy even tracks down an old college friend, George Noy (Jackie Earle Haley, Jr., "Little Children"), now housed in the dreaded C Ward; and later meets a facility doctor hiding out in a cave raving about the Cold War, mind-control experiments and brainwashing techniques. But like everything else, these story-lines, too, come to dead ends.
We now not only begin to question Teddy's sanity, but our own as the film takes even more hairpin turns until arriving at the single most disappointing conclusion of any Scorsese film ever made, especially in the light of Teddy's last bold declaration, which I was hoping (against all hope) would rectify and redeem his character, as well as the film.
Fans of the director will no doubt appreciate this effort and I do, too, in some respects. The acting, especially DiCaprio, Williams and Kingsley, are without flaw. The newly-hot Haley, Jr. huff and puffs admirably during his two-minute screen time, Von Sydow is appropriately German and Ruffalo basically reacts to Teddy the entire time.
The cinematography of Robert Richardson ("Inglourious Basterds," "The Aviator," "Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2") is always amazing, as well. His gritty, creepy, atmospheric view of the daunting Gothic castle-like structure takes on a life of its own.
It's a shame that Scorsese had to litter it all with dead kids, half-hearted nowhere scenes and incidental characters which turn out to mean absolutely nothing. I'm not an idiot and I don't want my films fed to me like a toddler in a high chair, but it doesn't hurt to walk away from a movie feeling one has gotten SOMETHING out of it.
Is that too much to ask?