Hall of Endless Mirrors and Little Else

Rating: 6/10 (20 June 2015)

Scorcese at 67. Obviously it needs to be full, luxurious, and each moment complete. No part of the film should disappoint, or elude the control or presence of the auteur. In consequence, each scene is carefully played out to satisfy the intent of the director, while he remains motionless. Although Shutter Island uses the dependable trope of cherchez la femme, a more appropriate focus would be the search for the réalisiteur. This is not to be confused with a lack of directing. The film is so over-directed that it ceases to be just that. And the film unwittingly deconstructs this very theme.
Leonardo DiCaprio, plays Teddy Daniels, a United States marshal taking a ferry ride out to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient in 1952. Like gangs of New York, the production design cannot be outdone, and thus lacks the spark of imaginative interpretation. There is no leap of faith required to believe in the environment created. What it makes up for in authority of voice, it loses for being lifeless and imperial. Like the experience of a theme park, every character we meet is to be no more and no less than we expect. No character should break out because it cannot conform to the role.
We watch DiCaprio playing the role of a man on a search in a flawlessly constructed historical über-reality. At no point do we stop seeing DiCaprio playing this role, and being the actor he is, we go along with it. At no moment do we actually feel like the constructed environment is anything but that. The film unfolds with increasing use of overly mannered genre fragments from thrillers and horror films, including a sound track that gives the literal interpretation of the visual dimension an updated definition. This only gets past us because we are in a fascinating theme park with a mesmerizing tour guide. All this schtick is supposed to provide the emotional aesthetic for DiCaprio's descent into the revelation of his insanity.
But this does not reveal anything about Scorcese, DiCaprio, the period so meticulously reproduced, or any one of the particular grand themes the film nods towards. This is particularly telling in the scenes set in the liberation of Dachau. The portrayal is heavily sanitized. The piles of bodies, in civilian clothes, not starved, and covered in snow. On the one hand one could applaud the unwillingness to engage in "KZ pornography", yet these images deprive the victims of the horrors they endured. They are not permitted the death they experienced, because it would obviously disrupt Scorcese's meticulously framed indulgence. The film viewer shares the same fate as DiCaprio, as he struggles to find any meaning in all of this .
DiCaprio's "decision" at the end of the movie to retain his madness, at the expense of a lobotomy, underscores this. He sacrifices his ability, and the burden, to adjudicate ambivalence and substance in order to formally assert his right to illusion. And by analogy, Scorcese affirms his own right to indulge his parallel reality, independent of what substance it may have for anyone involved. The problem is that, unlike Taxi Driver, he is not a (young) creator in search of himself in the periphery of society's failure. Shutter Island unwittingly serves as an example of how a film exemplifies the evisceration of once insightful creative indulgence, made possible only by the legacy of former successes.
The film is Scorcese's largest grossing movie. This success does little more than underscore the fact that it has no real intended audience. It is a Martin Scorcese film that exhausts itself in being that. The film carries us forward in the unfolding of an exquisitely crafted conceit that is entirely harmless and ultimately meaningless. This apotheosis of form is at the core of imperial entitlement. Through it Scorcese exercises his power and agency. But this proof is only of particular interest to Scorcese and the stakeholders around him. There is no place at the table for uncontrollable elements like substance or real pain.