Shutter Island (2010)
Some years ago, one of my my favourite film critics John Paterson opened a review of the then imminent film Bringing Out The Dead with the vivid image of his calendar being festooned with arching pointers and graphical contour lines all zeroing in on the films release date in a manner reminiscent of a World War 2 battle chart used by Rommel and the Führer High Command. In the intervening decade the anticipation of a new Scorsese picture, a cinematic event that used to be akin to the unearthing of the lost master print of Ambersons or the international cut of Metropolis has waned somewhat, his prestige and essential viewing status being incrementally eroded during a period when his output has been felt by some to be diluted, uncertain and neutered. I am perplexed at the mixed reviews this film has garnered in much the same way I was confused by the great reviews that the likes of The Aviator, The Departed and Gangs Of New York received, they’re not, well, not bad films per se but they were hardly in the same league as even Scorsese’s less well regarded earlier work. Thankfully this rut has been well and truly overcome with the arrival of Shutter Island, whilst it feels more Cape Fear than Taxi Driver in terms of an odyssey into a troubled mind it works, it’s a great film that I’m tag-lining as ‘Scorsese channels David Lynch’ – does that whet your appetite?
Shutter Island opens with the narcotic ellipse of a mysterious ferry prowling toward its target, the isolated Shutter Island off the coast of Boston, a quarantined archipelago that houses a mental asylum where the most dangerously 
insane criminals of 1950’s America are incarcerated. Marshall Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) is en route with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) who have been called to the island by its chief psychologist Dr. Cawley (Ben Kinglsey) due to the perplexing disappearance of a patient from her locked cell, a dangerous woman responsible for a trio of filicides. Daniels however has his own nefarious, submerged purpose to visit the island, suffering from crippling migraines and haunted by hallucinations of his dead wife Teddy is seeking out the arsonist who lit the fire that wrecked his life, perhaps to take his own form of perverted vengeance. As an ominous storm envelops and segregates the island from the outside world Teddy finds himself ensnared in a gloriously rendered CinemaScope fever dream where nothing is what it seems….
This is Scorsese’s best film in a decade. It is a cinematic feast with one of America’s greatest directors firing on all cylinders, marshalling a crew of technicians who are at the apotheosis of their craft – Dante Ferreti’s evocative, deliciously baroque production design, Thelma Schoonmaker’s stalwart editing and perhaps most strikingly Robert Richardson’s breathtaking lighting schemes make this one of the most visually sumptuous films I’ve seen for a long time – it is the work of a master director harnessing his confederates to produce their very best ingredients. Every frame is steeped in a tangible gloom that builds 
an aura, that generates a mirage of dread that permeates the film and here is the crucial issue – it feels like a Scorsese film, it has that probing, prowling camera that is his signature style, it has the bewildering whip pans and nervous jump cuts that feel organically perfect in this psychic landscape and there is one extraordinary tracking shot that will go down as one of the best in Marty’s oeuvre. It’s taken four stabs but Scorsese has finally harnessed a good performance from DeCaprio that feels amoebic within the tale, the leading man’s consistently anxious, nervous demeanour incrementally plummeting into a vortex of neurosis and uncertainty. The cast are uniformly excellent and it is a treat to see the likes of Max Von Sydow, Patricia Highsmith, Michelle Williams, Jackie Earl Hayley and Emily Mortimer parade along the screen, perhaps most memorably in just one scene Ted Levine (whom you may identify as Buffalo Bill from The Silence Of The Lambs) is particularly chilling and he’s playing a police warden, not one of the inmates…
One word – Hitchcock. The presence of the master of suspense looms over the proceedings in the best way possible and the plethora of references are impossible to escape and indeed litter the visual grammar of the film, this is a text that is arranged around the ideal of suspense and texture, atmosphere and ethos. The way that Teddy’s dream sequences and flashbacks to his harrowing experiences of liberating the Dachau concentration camp bleed into the real world are quite remarkable, leading to the natural comparisons with The Shining, in fact many critics are already calling this Scorsese’s 
equivalent to Kubrick’s classic, noting the presence of ghostly children, the labyrinthine setting and use of the very same Ligetti piece over the opening scene that was employed here. When you have watched as many ghost and horror films as I have over the years you naturally build up a resistance and its almost impossible to make me feel uncomfortably tense when watching someone wander around some gloomy chambers, not so with Shutter Island which is genuinely creepy and jumpy at points, the whole film has a tangible neurasthenia that is further magnified by its fifties setting throwing in communist paranoia and the rumor that the Island is a secret front for a battery of CIA mind control tests on the unsuspecting inmates, further textures that settle and magnify the cyclone of neurosis. It is a film that for many reasons demands a second viewing (one podcast I listen to memorably mentioned that he wished he was watching it again the first time he was watching it) and it’s one of the most brilliantly crafted entries into the psychological thriller genre of recent memory.
Rather than subject you to another Scorsese retrospective I thought it best to collate the films he has obviously referenced in the movie (many of the Hitchcock’s are here), from those he’s mentioned in 
interviews I’ve 
subsequently read up on over the weekend, from those that he screened as reference points for the cast and crew plus others that spring to mind as potential nodes of influence. Finally a couple of similarly Hitchcockian movies including Frantic which I saw again as part of a mini Polanski season I’m in the midst of as part of my preparation for the release of his new movie The Ghost Writer next month. Right, it looks as if I’ve finally managed to secure a new assignment so I’m off for a day of celebration at the flicks, first up The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo followed by a screening of Slasher and a John Landis Q&A at the NFT, I must be mental….
Minty's Menagerie 
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