Shutter society..

Rating: 7/10 (9 March 2010)

For American standards, this is a relatively difficult film, with an elliptical narrative, "dead" spaces, ornate direction, slow pacing, and so forth. It is also very uneven, tense and claustrophobic on one hand, but with lots of ups and downs on the other. At it's best, it is very intense, at it's worst, it is downright flat and predictable, and hardly helped by the anemic meaning.
First things first. As a director, Scorsese is probably at his finest here, which is good. Compared to, say, Coppola, he is still evolving, which is the sign of a healthy artist. He is still not an auteur, but this is overall his best direction.
Now, the little trick of having two realities warping around each other is borrowed by David Lynch, and is hardly causing any sort of sensation anymore. The ending with the lobotomy is also borrowed from Gilliam's "Brazil", as is the whole message in general, that in turn is borrowed from Orwell's "1984". The message here is that of a society evolving from the ghosts of a brutal World War II, that is seemingly democratic, but in reality authoritarian and artificial. The subtle references about McCarthyism are nice, but actually the whole message is rather vague, and in the end serves as a pretense for a claustrophobic existential thriller.