Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is a spectre. A ghostly vapor of a great film adapted from the page-turning novel of the same name.

For those who haven't seen the trailer here's the story: a pair of U.S. Marshals are called to Shutter Island to investigate a missing inmate from a high-security asylum for the criminally insane. The patient apparently walked right through the stone walls of her locked cell and is loose somewhere on the forbidding island. What starts as a detective story quickly becomes a locked-room witch hunt spanning Nazi-inspired human experimentation to government-funded conspiracies designed to topple the Communists.

As a disclaimer, I should note that I read the novel this week. I really enjoyed it and was eager to see the film. The novel is a fast, spooky, funny, mind-bending trip filled to overflowing with colorful characters, memorable dialogue, and unsettling nightmarish visuals. The filmmakers, either in an effort to condense the novel or keep to a studio-mandated running time, have trimmed much of these elements to craft their final product.

Not that film is without its merits. Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, delivers a very solid and mature performance. His nuanced portrayal of the wounded hero Teddy Daniels gives the film its center. He's surrounded by a veritable who's who of character actors including Max Von Sydow, Elias Koteas, Jackie Earl Haley, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams, and Ted Levine. Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley do admirably well with the under-written parts they were handed.

It just doesn't feel like a "Scorsese picture." The soundtrack is a moody classical score - no anachronistic rock n' roll to be found here. No fast zooms or intricate tracking shots. No highly charismatic villains who we're all secretly rooting for. Even Thelma Schoonmaker, the three-time-Oscar-winning Editor who has worked on all of Scorsese's films, paints the pacing all wrong. At times her overlapping of the dialogue and action create a cacophony of inputs that add to the intensity of the storyline. At other times things seem sloppy after thoughts.

The visual hallucinations in the book feel immediate, urgent, and scary. They focus on the Teddy's unraveling and move the story and the characters to their ultimate crescendo. The film spends too much time focusing on Teddy's flashbacks to the atrocities he witnessed in World War II and on the infanticide that resides at the heart of the story. These sequences felt more ghoulish in the movie than the novel. They are essential to the story, but Scorsese seems to be pushing the wrong buttons - hard.

In the end, this feels like what it is - a studio picture with a high pedigree. Scorsese, who's singular style and vision has crafted some of the most memorable movie moments in the last three decades is handed the unenviable task of committing someone else's solidly realized vision to the screen. Dennis Lehane's novel was like reading a movie, a movie made by a master filmmaker. This picture feels like someone efforting to channel a master filmmaker.

Some will compare this picture to Kubrick's The Shining, the picture in which Stanley channeled Stephen King's work. That movie, while also not hewing extremely close to the source material, is still unsettling to watch. The pace, the sparse music, the utter emptiness of the hotel are haunting and memorable. Shutter Island, on the other hand, fades as you walk from the theater.

I would recommend you read the book of Shutter Island. Then curl up and watch a classic Scorsese movie to get over your fears and get some sleep. Try Goodfellas.