A Post-Script Regarding Predictability

>There is an element of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island that I barely touched on in my review, but which I believe needs to be briefly addressed at (slightly) greater length: the ending. I'm going to assiduously avoid spoilers in this post, but I would like to invite anyone who knows the film, or Dennis Lehane's novel, to let 'er rip in the comments, should they so desire, so anyone unfamiliar with either version of the story should be warned that the comments section here could turn into a hotbed of storytelling ruination. A hotbed, I tell you.

The truth is that I believe many people will outright hate the ending. And the further truth, as I implied in my review, is that when reading the novel, I was quite disappointed at the conclusion. I thought, in a sense, that I'd been jerked around. But the film has me reconsidering my harsh judgment of said ending, and most of this is due to the fact that Scorsese foregrounds an aspect of the story in a way that, to people who know nothing about where the story's heading, will make the ending predictable, even a foregone conclusion...intentionally so, perhaps. Okay, I have no way of knowing quite how predictable the film's climax -- the solution to the mystery -- will be to people who don't know the novel. However, it seemed to me that, experiencing the ending as the final moments of a, I believe, masterfully constructed film, the ending, specifically the solution to a complex mystery, has been backgrounded a bit. It's pretty much the exact same ending as the novel (with one interesting jolt to it), but it didn't seem like Scorsese cared about it functioning as a "twist". I think he'd be perfectly happy if everyone predicted what was coming early on, and just wanted to see how the story and visuals built to it. Scorsese has said in the past that while he loves well-plotted films, as a moviegoer, as a director he doesn't have much sense on how to make them. I think he sells himself short a bit in that sense, but clearly his primary interest lies elsewhere. And I think it's hard to argue that his interest lay elsewhere when putting Shutter Island together -- every frame of the film practically shrieks that fact.

All of which, I acknowledge, sounds very much like an attempt to make excuses for what could be regarded as a big flaw in the film. But I wonder, if you do not pick up on Scorsese's clues -- which I think are quite blatant -- and find yourself as bugged by Scorsese's Shutter Island as I was when I first read Lehane's novel, what your reaction would be when and if you revisit the film at a later date. If, in other words, you go in experiencing the film as work of visual art, and not as an unfolding narrative. And by the way, I'm all about experiencing films as an unfolding narrative -- it's one of the main reasons I watch them -- but I also know full well what a given film's greater power can be in the long run. If narrative was all films were about, then very few films would have any rewatch value, and we all know that an overwhelming number of them do. So what I'm arguing for here is Shutter Island's rewatch value, something even I can't gauge, and I loved it the first time around.

But those of you who've seen it, ignorant of where it was heading...how did the ending strike you? Did you think, as I do, that Scorsese was relentlessly and deliberately signalling his intentions almost from the start, so that the ending was not quite the left turn that other takes on the story might have been, but entirely of a piece with the intense imagery that preceded it?

Traum

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In David Edelstein's negative review of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, he takes a second to place at least a little bit of the blame on Dennis Lehane's source novel. "Dennis Lehane's novel," he writes "...is a doodle, a Paul Auster Lite breather between his tortured Mystic River and the panoramic The Given Day." What Paul Auster has to do with what's in that book, I don't know, but I will agree with Edelstein on a couple of things about Lehane's work, neither of which are stated outright, but which can be inferred: that Mystic River is a masterpiece, and that Shutter Island isn't as good (I haven't read The Given Day yet). What I absolutely do not agree with Edelstein about is the idea that Shutter Island was, for Lehane, a lark, some inconsequential dash-off that he needed to get out of the way before he settled down to something that mattered. I don't know how you can read that book and not feel to your bones the deep sense of loss, the spiritual tearing that comes with grief, on every page. Where I turned ambivalent to Lehane's novel was the climax, when the hugely entertaining post-World War II Gothic-detective maze reaches its destination, and I was forced to incredulously ask "That's what this was about?"

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Yes, that's what it was about, and while I still am not sure the ending is as strong as it could be, either on the page or on the screen, or that there maybe wasn't some other way entirely to do it, Martin Scorsese's film version (written by Laeta Kalogridis, and co-produced by Lehane) makes me feel a little bit like a chump for being so unsure about Lehane's motivation. Before I get into why, I should probably confess something. You see, I think Martin Scorsese -- or "MartSco", as he'd probably insist I call him, should we ever meet -- is a good filmmaker. I enjoy his films very much, and have done so for many, many years. Wait, don't leave! I understand that a past and -- worse, and therefore more importantly -- consistent appreciation of Scorsese's work renders any opinion I have of whatever movie he has out right now null and void (provided that opinion is a positive one), and that the only people who can be trusted to give an honest and clear-headed assessment of MartSco's current work are those who haven't liked any of his movies from the past decade (or so I've recently learned), but please, let me at least finish. These water buckets are heavy.

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It's hard to know where to begin talking about Scorsese's Shutter Island. It might do to quote Edelstein again, who laments that the film is "suffocatingly movieish", which is a hell of a thing to complain about. When Edelstein reads Nabokov's fiction, does he complain that it's "too novelly"? If I take him to mean that the film is too bold in its style, then I would ask what, exactly, he was expecting? After all, Shutter Island is about two U.S. Marshals -- Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) -- who, in 1954, are sent out to the titular island, on which can be found Ashcliff Hospital, an institute for the criminally insane, from which has escaped a patient named Rachel Solando, who is, we are told, a very dangerous woman. Daniels is a pretty beat-up looking wreck when we first meet him, and he's also a war hero who helped liberate Dachau, an ex-drinker, and a widower -- his wife died a couple years back, in a fire ("She died of smoke inhalation," Daniels tells Chuck. "Not the fire. That's very important."). So this island, and this asylum, is packed with mentally deranged killers, and, as the film opens, the hospital staff and the prison guards (for Ashcliff is that, too, in a sense) are a bit concerned about the massive stormfront heading their way. So, 1950s, island, mental asylum, deranged killers, hurricane...all well and good, but please, could you tone it down a bit!?

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The gist of all this being that I think Shutter Island is beautiful, the most visually arresting film Scorsese has made since Gangs of New York, and the most stylistically consistent, and the most justified and organic in its specific bold choices, since at least Casino, and probably as far back as Goodfellas. With this film, I got the feeling that Scorsese was scratching a particularly nagging itch, one he hadn't quite reached the last time he tried for it, with his, I believe, badly misjudged remake of J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear. As Teddy Daniels goes deeper into the case, he begins to have some fairly awful flashbacks, and even worse nightmares, about his past traumas in the war, and dealing with the death of his wife. The nightmare sequences, in particular, are gloriously horrible, rich and varied in their imagery, and like all good nightmares, more terrible before we know what they mean than after.

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These scenes -- the whole film, really -- are nightmare-as-opera, Gothic horror treated seriously, not as a way to get a few kicks. Scorsese is pulling from a very deep cinematic well for his inspiration here: Kubrick, film noir, Val Lewton, Ingmar Bergman (the very welcome presence of Max von Sydow in the film, as one of the hospital's senior doctors, wasn't the only thing about Shutter Island that made me think of Hour of the Wolf). So it's this self-consciousness, and not just what Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson make the camera do, that is probably what Edelstein means when he talks about the movie being "movieish", but so what? Remember how last year everybody was saying that Inglourious Basterds was really, at its heart, all about movies? And how that was so great and everything? Well, so is Shutter Island. In this film, characters say things, important things, while staring off into the middle distance, like characters in a 1940s melodrama. And watch Mark Ruffalo in the background of an early scene set at the home of Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley); DiCaprio, Kingsley and Von Sydow have pretty much all the lines, but when Ruffalo does interject, he has the jittery bits of business and sweep-the-room eyes of a film noir character actor.

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The puzzled look on your face tells me that I'm doing a bad job of describing this -- well, it is difficult to put into words, but the point is that while Scorsese may be wearing his cinematic influences on his sleeve here, and he wants you to notice (though it's plenty okay if you don't), his motives are pure: this is the best way to tell this story, to build this mood, and to oppress you with an atmosphere of violence, mourning, madness, and soul-destroying guilt.

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All of which is just more "water-balloon throwing to Marty", or whatever it is people who enjoyed this film are supposed to be doing. If you clicked on any of those links I provided earlier, you'll probably have seen people making reference to the dishonesty inherent in anything positive said about the film, and Scorsese in general, and you'll have seen Glenn Kenny -- who was quite keen on the movie -- wonder if possibly some of his goodwill towards it has to do with his state of mind at the time he saw it. Well, let me offer my own bit of justification for feeling the way I do about Shutter Island: this is the kind of shit I like! I love film noir, I love Gothic horror, stories about storms and the criminally insane, and their possibly evil doctors. And I love it best when it's taken seriously.

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I've often wished that I'd never seen The Shining, so that I could still look forward to seeing it for the first time. The very idea that an artist of Kubrick's stature made a straight-ahead horror film on such a grand and chilling scale is something I will always be grateful for. Shutter Island, for reasons that might finally amount to nitpickery, is not quite horror, not literally, but in its wonderfully suffocating moviesh-ness, it recognizes two things very specific to the genre, and even portrays both: that all supernatural horror is a metaphor: for death, our fear of it, of the unknown and our fear of that; and that the truth behind the metaphor is quite often worse than we ever imagined.

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