Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island: A Review

Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island, a devotedly aestheticist adaptation of Dennis Lehane‘s 2003 novel, opened to surprisingly mixed reviews (thankfully more positive than negative), the worse of which seemed to agree on three points: 1) the film is a visual tour-de-force; 2) the film/plot may come across as “clunky,”  “silly,” “flawed,” “lugubrious,” and “intellectually undernourished“; and 3) Shutter Island is nowhere near Scorsese’s best work, hardly a “masterpiece.”

Much of the fussiness with Shutter Island arises from a perception that Scorsese’s considerable erudition and verve are wasted upon a film whose story seems to have no overt purpose or greater resonance beyond its mere sensationalism. The only response to this perception, of course, is that Shutter Island is a genre film through-and-through, one which plies its force on the preparation of atmospherics in lieu of overcautious dramatic scaffolding. But it is unwise to disavow the mastery of narrative on display in Shutter Island; the film is not, as some critics desire to call it, a “pastiche” of every classic thriller Scorsese has seen (and he has probably seen all of them). Certain shots, story elements, and setpieces are lifted from Hitchcock, Jacques Tourneur, Orson Welles, Robert Aldrich, Sam Fuller, William Peter Blatty; but they are not “sledgehammer replicas” (as one critic put it), because their expressive functionality within the story is never questioned or performed with elaborate insincerity: any noir connoisseur knows that the same tropes (visual and narrative) are used and recycled again and again because they work, and have always worked, in the noir tradition. The shot of a body plunged down from a great height, and a mutilated flower or a still-burning discarded cigarette left behind as a memento mori, are not stolen from Vertigo, they are rediscovered, their impact reconfigured; the very same picture-idea is replaced in the familiar grim atmosphere that wills the same emotion to being. No other type of film (except the formalist horror film) can support the weight of such mournful dissociative images (strewn flower petals, the discarded stub of a cigarette, a dead mangled body). All noirs replay the same unsolved murders and dangerously concealed desperations through the motifs of minor poetry.

The visual particulars of Shutter Island work as allusions, clues to the overarching schematic of insanity, uncertainty, and the terror of the past that lies at the heart of noir-narratives. The story is “lugubrious” because it must be lugubrious, it must lurch — feverishly spellbound by the grandiose — when it is not sprinting toward the ever more excessive. Plausibility is not the noir’s forte, it is the first component directly messed with: stretching the realm of the unreal — of what is so unreal as to elicit real-time fear and loathing — toward the brink of the absurd. The noir is a hallucination of the truth, dimly-lit, half-seen through frosted glass, and perversely magnetic to those who welcome to bed their doom.

Some noirs and horror films lend themselves to surprise and twist endings, and Shutter Island is no exception. Film School Rejects‘ Landon Palmer explains the differences between a “twist ending” and a “surprise ending,” and he makes a convincing case for Shutter Island as an exemplary model of the latter kind. Shutter Island succeeds in unsettling the viewer because it never pretends to be a film with a crucial or completely unforeseen twist in mind; the film very thoroughly and cogently (to the frustration of over-anxious critics) dictates what its “surprise ending” will be long before it happens. And when the “surprise” does arrive, the lucent character(s) responsible for explaining away the knots and u-turns the viewer had undergone, spare no effort in outlining in explicit detail what exactly happened on the island. Palmer explains,

In the surprise ending, no trick comes out of left field, and no twist makes us rethink the entire film. With the surprise ending, the film concludes at its most natural point. It’s an ending that is explicitly expected in that throughout the film we feel something conclusive will happen – we’re just not sure what – while the trajectory of the film maps out a direct line to such a conclusion, with minimal detours along the way. Despite this clear linear trajectory, the surprise ending remains surprising because of the shock value of the conclusion itself. What the conclusion reveals does not change the entire meaning of the film – rather, it answers the question we were asking the whole time, but perhaps not in the exact way we envisioned it or speculated it taking place. Here is the key to what distinguishes a surprise ending from other endings: the entire film poses a central question, and the surprise ending answers that exact question in a shocking, effective, startling, or revealing way.

A common ploy of film criticism is to come off offended at the predictability or unbelievability of story plots. This habit of criticism derives from a tired reliance on critiquing a film’s “substance,” which will more often than not implicitly refer to the strength of a film’s story or plot when pretending to treat of its overall “aesthetic” quality. Categorically speaking, understanding and critiquing a film on the basis of the story’s plausibility is the elementary step in the appreciation of films — it is the first step, and thus, an unavoidable criterion for a film’s quality. Savvier film critics will masquerade this intellectual weakness for plot viability as an Aristotelian concern for the successful execution of theme and function. I say “intellectual weakness” because judging whether a film is good or bad on the practicality of its storyline, on the believability of its characters, or on the tenability of its resolution is a habit of mind that equates cinema to the lesser forms of literature which derive their baseness from factual representation. Cinema is certainly not factual representation, for this has always been its chief glory: that it can make a factual case for pictures that do not wholly — I mean all-together, part-to-part — take systematic place in time. The effectiveness of the image takes precedence over the justification of its existence. Cinema is sculpting in time, more so than representation, a vindication of what should be or should have been or, at bottom, what could very well be. Cinema enforces a rhythm on disparities otherwise temporally incongruous. Like any surrealist canvas by Magritte or calligramme by Apollinaire, the immediately intelligible will be patterned on and interwoven with the latently subtextual: an incongruous assembly is cemented together indistinguishably.

It is at the conjunction of surreality and truth-function where Shutter Island excels in its approach to the surprise ending: the film is visually arresting enough to distract from the clues, and it effectively pleads to be watched again. Because the ending is already alluded to within the cinematic fabric, the resolution turns out to be more a realization than a surprise, a determination to follow through on a linear thought process of disguised binaries. On one side is cinema — the visible dream-state, the “systematic derangement of the senses” — and on the other end is reality — the undisclosed truth, the hidden meaning of it all. Scorsese quite knowingly plays with cinema-semantics in order to analyze the repetitive nature of noir: what is the truth if not the mental invention of a hero in search of epic meaning, of a meaning greater than him and all the quotidian world combined? While some have complained of Shutter Island‘s prosaic, preachy, and drawn-out ending, I find it to supremely capitalize the staid quality of “reality” (as it is, as it appears, as it must be) in contrast to the analogic fever-dream of the cinematic imagination. Yes, the truth may be more banal than we think, or perhaps more ridiculous than what is patently unbelievable. Genre cinema is the political perfection of narrative fakery — the 50s conspiracy escapade that gets us to believe in international hydrogen bomb plots, red-nosed commies, insidious double-agents, and satanic torture facilities. The noir protagonist is more willing to accept ludicrous subplots and world domination schemes than the simple proposition that he might be wrong: he cannot be wrong if he is able to make true what never really existed. Equally, the average media-exposed citizen (i.e. the common filmgoer) is sometimes quite ready to give credence to the idea that an international terrorist organization is hellbent on plotting the total destruction of a country at the slightest offense.

The invention of the truth is the centripetal force that drives the noir protagonist — the damaged and cynical private dick, the guilt-stricken cop struggling against trauma, the goldhearted but unlucky criminal in search of redemption — to relinquish his freedom of ignorance for the sake of oedipal discovery. But Shutter Island is not so purely a noir as it is an aesthetic hybrid of horror elements and pulp mystery theater: a shadowy post-World War II narrative directed with the visual panache of Dario Argento. Watching Scorsese’s rendition of the genre-type, I was reminded of the italian maestro’s great giallo films, from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to Deep Red, from Suspiria to Opera; the heightened gothic composition, the operatic and macabre blasts of music, the perverse thrill of reasonless violence, the faintly ridiculous, radical-psychology ending (only this time upholstered by Scorcese’s/Lehane’s more dramatically reasonable Sophoclean resolution) are all characteristic of Argento’s oeuvre. Argento took the Mario Bava gothic model and intensified it with wildly sweeping camera improvisations that tend to frustrate those critics in search of adequate story ration and social-moral epitome. One watches an Argento film not to be edified, but to be sensually assaulted and subconsciously hijacked by a mental terrorist. Shutter Island is such an experience, except with a last-chance attempt at narrative reconciliation. Its florid light-and-camera strokes and its flirtations with mannerist horror are epigrammatic rather than elaborately wholesome, but they cut through the story’s mold with stylistic efficiency. If the film’s ending seems unwieldy to those who preview it, it is nonetheless necessitated by the disproportionately phantasmal structure of its gothic spires and baroque designs.

If Shutter Island cannot be called a masterpiece on par with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, I am still inclined to believe that age will judge it well: the film is a felicitous incident of pure technique prevailing against the preciousness of overweening plausibility. Robert Richardson’s cinematography and lighting, Dante Ferretti’s production design, Sandy Powell’s costuming, and a well-selected cast of actors combine terrifically with Scorsese’s directorial prowess. More importantly, Scorsese reestablishes the claim that cinema can be made more powerful, indeed more sensually explosive, when in harmonic tandem with its musical equation. Kubrick’s preeminence as the director who perfected the art of the film soundtrack is closely emulated by the impeccable soundtrack selected by Scorsese and Robbie Robertson to narrate the hypertensions and traumas of Shutter Island. (One reviewer has already astutely commented that Shutter Island will take a similar place in Scorsese’s oeuvre as The Shining does in Kubrick’s.)

While watching Shutter Island, the music hit me first and it was the music that stayed with me at the end; I was convinced that the film’s musical score was the most consummate I had heard in decades. And of course it was masterful: the score wasn’t an original one by a single composer, but a collection of the major compositions by 20th century avant-gardists: Giacinto Scelsi, Krzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Ingram Marshall, Brian Eno, and Paik Nam June, among others. The music editors have accomplished a seamless job of sewing the divergent compositions together at pivotal moments. The dramatic use of Penderecki’s “Symphony No. 3: Passacaglia – Allegro Moderato” particularly stands out in memory: it assaults us on our foggy, dread-filled passage to the nefarious island setting, and it sets the climactic tone to the rest of the film as monumentally as Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” had for the conclusion of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.