The product of a very sick mind... but still a pretty good film

Rating: 6/10 (8 June 2010)

Do people still wonder why the Academy of Arts and Sciences hesitates to give an Oscar to Martin Scorsese every time he is nominated? Could it be because of his propensity to use his huge talent for directing and his academic knowledge of cinematic story-telling devices only to gross out his public? I mean, what are his real accomplishments besides upping the violence quotient in every film he makes and telling us that Italians are murderers and Mafiosi with colourful speech patterns and creative ways of killing the people who show them disrespect and even the people they love? Scorsese is like that distant cousin who is uniquely preoccupied with looking up women's skirts and wonders why he never gets a date. Except his particular vice happens to be showing, analyzing and brooding over the myriad facets of the wonderful world of violence and bloodletting, like a creep tearing the wings off flies.
In this case, the film is well put together and tells an acceptable story, not without a lot of channeling of Kubrick's "The Shining". It has atmosphere in spades and the hurricane scenes are particularly well thought-out. The art direction, acting and cinematography are superb even though the director has once again opted for the extremely clichéed blue-green colour scheme that has become, from sheer banality, the shame of the American cinema of the past 10 years. The script is semi-literate in spite of its numerous anachronisms (to name just three: the use of the phrases "electronic systems" and "no problem" and the depiction of an attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation).
The music is effective in communicating suspense and terror even though it is an anthology of every piece of modern writing that could never ever please an audience on its own except as an accompaniment to scenes from an insane asylum.
Violence is such a powerful force in modern American society that it is indeed a legitimate field of enquiry and exploration. What Mr. Scorsese should ask himself, however, is whether he belongs with the people who are legitimately reflecting on violence or whether, as one of the individuals who have contributed the most to desensitizing the movie-going public to its horror, he is part of the problem.
In that sense, the film is indicative of Martin Scorsese's own career: ***SPOILER*** in the end, the patient discovers all the crimes of which he is guilty and understands the measures that must be taken to protect society from his further abuses.
I'm not saying that his next project should be a remake of "Heidi" but it WOULD be therapeutic for him and certainly a step in the right direction.