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I could offer up equal amounts praise and criticism for this film, but I'll settle by saying that I have mixed feelings about it. The explanation at the end was pretty grating -- someone actually started yelling in the theater "This is shit! This is boring!" which made the whole ordeal even more tedious until they shut up, even if I sort of agreed with them.

I loved the beginning. The first half hour or so is beautifully set up, but it soon gets scrambled into frantic silliness. Much of the second half felt arbitrary. It seemed to float from plot contrivance to plot contrivance, and I could forgive stale genre conventions if they managed to evoke a certain mood or create an atmosphere unique to that genre but by this time Scorcese's atmospherics had run dry.
The dream sequences were banal and obvious. They seemed to offer up perfunctory plot points at the expense of being genuinely interesting. I suppose I prefer more enigmatic dreams, those which evoke the actuality of dreaming rather than shuttling a plot forward in the simplest manner possible. There were a few exceptions, namely the early one with the ash and water and blood. I especially had trouble with two tropes: the repetition of the wife (though emotionally pertinent) was plain and unaffecting, and the scenes riddled with blood and dead children lacked any impact whatsoever.

Which carried on through, for me, to the climactic memory during the explanation. Most folks seemed impressed by that, even if the rest of the ending let them down. For me, scenes like that are virtually impossible. They are, first of all, too often explored in films. They lose their impact over time. But more than that I find them uniformly unconvincing. They always seem ridiculous. How can something so absurd, so beyond the realm of reason, not seem ridiculous? Especially when you play it straight. I guess I'm not convinced by people acting anguished. I should feel anguished through what I'm seeing, not told I should feel anguished by who I'm watching.
This scene in particular suffered from the setup from the rest of the film. How am I supposed to care about these children when I've only ever seen them dead? Or his wife, whose image has only ever spouted stock cryptic advice? We are given this twist and told to feel his anguish when the preceding hour and a half -- by nature of its genre conventions -- failed to even establish this line of thought? I felt the detachment one feels when reading about a triple murder in the newspaper. Black and white indifference.

I don't mean to be so hard on the film. Like I said, I loved the first half, the very beginning especially. The very end, post-explanation, was interesting. And aside from the climax, I mostly liked the memories (those being distinct, mostly, from the dream sequences). I adored the image of the snow falling past the windows, foregrounded by the falling paper. The botched suicide of the officer, which in a simple gesture said more than the tracking shot massacre (although that was brilliantly done, and terribly unnerving). And the editing was. . . well, I'd like to pay more attention to it during a second viewing. Often effective, and possibly very subversive in its intent.

Glad I saw it, anyway. It was better than I thought it would be.

I enjoyed it, more so than his Weinstein pictures, but I'm not sure it would repay multiple viewings. I felt this was Marty's second attempt at a B movie after Cape Fear (and I found Shutter Island superior to the former) but the film is hampered by clunky exposition and it stops dead in the middle section; disappointing given that the pacing was hitherto so assured. The big reveal didn't feel like a cheat to me as you get clues right from the get-go but I was bothered by the hamfistedness of that sequence: did it have to be so literal to the extent of Ben Kingsley producing a chalkboard to explain it all? I found that Leo's final line (was that in Lehane's book? can anyone confirm?) made the film more poignant and emotionally resonant than it would have been otherwise. I was moved by Leo's performance but as someone mentioned earlier, the script doesn't make you care for Dolores and the children, and yes some of the dream sequences definitely feel emotionally flat. Still, even a minor Scorsese (and I don't even really have much personal love for his best work) is much better than the dreck produced 99% of the time and as a pulpy melodrama it wasn't half-bad.

Can anyone confirm who the music was by that played repeatedly in the film? Ligeti or Penderecki?

I can't get the film out of my head and if I find the time next weekend I may well go to see it again or get the Blu-Ray eventually. So many individual moments, images and the score are resonating with me so strongly that I'm compelled to think that the strengths of the film (Scorsese's direction, the excellent performances but DiCaprio especially, the first hour and final 20 or so minutes, Scorsese and Schoonmaker's employment of music and editing, the wonderful, ominous final shot of the lighthouse) offset the shortcomings to a large extent. I found it interesting that many critics remark on the "silliness" of the major twist, and I wondered if the central idea of it struck them as too elaborate.

Well, it is elaborate but it makes complete sense within the context of what the film is about at heart and the scheme is not any more elaborate than, say, Gavin Elster's masterplan in Vertigo is (in fact, Shutter Island might make for a nice double bill with the Hitchcock of films about male trauma and the repercussions of it). Of all Scorsese's recent films, this strikes me as the most misunderstood, and hopefully it'll be reassessed in a few years' time (think Peeping Tom, Fire Walk With Me etc).

Mr Finch wrote: I found it interesting that many critics remark on the "silliness" of the major twist, and I wondered if the central idea of it struck them as too elaborate.

Well, it is elaborate but it makes complete sense within the context of what the film is about at heart and the scheme is not any more elaborate than, say, Gavin Elster's masterplan in Vertigo is (in fact, Shutter Island might make for a nice double bill with the Hitchcock of films about male trauma and the repercussions of it).

I agree. The film's twist is a gimmick, to be sure, but unlike most such narrative gimmicks in contemporary films, it does make sense with (and, more to the point, make sense of) what came before. And if the whole set-up does seem retrospectively unlikely and over-elaborate, it is indeed no more unlikely than those in any number of classic films, as Mr Finch notes. (And was the general critical response to Vertigo on release really so different? Hitchcock never did have much patience for 'The Plausibles'.)

okay, so I just returned from this film and I'll say up front I'm a huge Scorsese fan.

Spoiler

I was ambivalent toward the plot twist, which I guessed within the first five minutes; it really isn't that hard to figure out --of course they're going to leave that option open. As usual, looking for Scorsese's influences is a lot of fun per scene, but the gothic atmosphere was was worth a lot of the ticket price for me as well. I also have a theory about the plot twist; that it only doesn't work for the film if the conspiracy theory that guides the plot isn't somehow a viable option. In other words, is it possible the conspiracy theory is correct all along? So I'm trying to come up with an absolute moment of proof in the film that would 100% prevent the conspiracy theory from playing out and as of yet, I can't think of it. Can someone help me out here? I'm hoping the conspiracy remains viable somehow, but I have a deep unease that it likely does not.

I feared as much.

I'd like to reiterate my earlier argument and my earlier call out to Twin Peaks. I would suggest that karmajuice is reading the ending incorrectly insofar as he seems to want to maintain this particular form of ambiguity. Now normally I'm all for ambiguity, the more the better; but in this case it would seem to me that Scorsese makes an obvious, determined effort to eradicate all such ambiguity purposefully. Why would he choose to do that? Perhaps to force concentration away from what he may have seen as distracting ambiguity. This is a valid artistic choice. Lynch often did the same thing when he came in to direct an episode of Peaks. All the kind of carefully accumulated detail usually so critical to keep track of in mystery shows, the continuity itself, would be swept aside by the introduction of conflicting, contradictory information that only served to negate what we thought we knew not complicate it; and these new details were presented mostly as equally legitimate facts, thus on the same conceptual plane. This, I have long held, was done to communicate to the audience what Lynch's real priorities were, the thematic content. There can be little other explanation as these occurrences were not insignificant ones. Can one imagine the level of devastation the audience of, say, Lost would feel should such a tactic occur amongst that show's carefully sculpted sea of mythic information--if the producers just took out some random Jenga pieces and allowed the whole edifice to come tumbling down at the service of emphasizing a different focal point (that won't happen with Lost of course, though the details there may just simply not add up to what many in the audience want). Anyway, a similar strategy is at work in Shutter Island as Scorsese clears away all questions about plot so as to allow the impact of his dramatic scenario to sink in unimpeded by distraction.

As to karmajuice's other problem, namely not being effected much by the flashback reveal: well, what can I say to that? I guess you either are or you aren't but I would argue that the level of distress we see is meant to register as pretty unbelievable in terms of scope and impact. It's the scope that makes the impact credible. Yet it's not as though there isn't a long tradition of just such sheer excess in terms of presentation of hysterical tragedy, certain operas come to mind.

Also, to say that it comes across as remote, like reading about it the papers, doesn't do proper justice to the way in which the reveal functions. Because it's not just a twist it's also the inevitable ending of this narrative. As such the power of the reveal emerges out of carefully wrought organic unity; it's not just some arbitrary twist for the sheer hell of it. In that sense then, as it sinks in with us what Teddy has been in the business of suppressing and denying (as it sinks in with him simultaneously) we are able to shift into a more receptive frame of mind which can accommodate these changes and also process them as ultimately of a piece with the rest, the end point of a very particular properly structured whole.

This plays like a 1950s movie made with all of today's movie trimmings. Would have been better at say 80 mins. There seems to be an obscure clue to the ending in the script, where DeCaprio and his partner enter the hospital and hear some music, Mark Ruffalo asks if it's Brahms and Leo grimacing says "No, it's Mahler."

Is some of the audience supposed to remember that Mahler wrote

Spoiler

Kindertotenlieder (Songs for Dead Children) ?

[quote="zedz"] And if the whole set-up does seem retrospectively unlikely and over-elaborate, it is indeed no more unlikely than those in any number of classic films/quote]

Spoiler

I actually find the reveal, while being an elaborate set-up, quite plausible: Teddy has relapsed once before and he has attacked other patients. It strikes me as quite moving in retrospect and as a testament to Dr Sheehan's sympathy for Teddy that he would go to such lengths to try give Teddy some permanent stability and be his true self again.

If anything, the set-up in Vertigo strikes me as too elaborate: Elster's plan hinges on Scottie NOT climbing up to the top of the belltower or that he would at least leave soon enough for Elster to escape unnoticed. I suspect that some critics' adverse reaction to Shutter Island stems from a privately held belief that Scorsese should be above pulp material. Personally, I had more fun with this than any of his acclaimed masterpieces and while it may be too flawed to be a genuinely great film, I think attains such emotional power and has enough merit to be considered a very good one.

My issues with the ending have nothing whatsoever to do with the implausibility of what happened before. Certainly, it is implausible. Did the good Doctor summon the fierce storm that made half the narrative possible? Are all the patients actors -- because really, are we expected to believe that an institution could manage this sort of project financially? If not, are we expected to believe that they would let clearly dangerous patients (like the one in Ward C) wander unattended? Certainly we can accept that some of this is skewed to Teddy's perspective, but we must draw a line somewhere. I don't see how anyone could regard the narrative as even remotely plausible. It's not.

But like I said, that doesn't bother me. Narrative contrivances seldom bother me, and I love plenty of films with dubious setups (for instance, I have no qualms with the credibility of Vertigo). Nor do I consider the twist ending of this film merely a twist ending -- the film firmly establishes precedence early on, and the ending ties into the film's concerns. My problem is this: because the "oh my god the protagonist is actually one of the patients" convention is so stale the twist ending must rely on some element other than surprise. Granted, the film strives for emotional impact. I think it fails, because the emotional impact is secondary to the mechanics of the plot. Right up until the end, anyway, when we're expected to buy into the reversal.



Okay, so, I've typed several paragraphs, then re-typed them, and they made some good points but they were pretty messy. I've come up with a fairly concise issue I have with the film, and I can explain my reasoning more thoroughly if I need to.

I think the explanatory ending is in direct conflict with the bulk of the film. While the film uses the conspiracy theory to perpetuate doubt, it only does so to postpone the inevitable twist ending (which we suspected from the beginning). One half of the film tries to entertain us according to the genre's conventions. The other half tries to deliver a tragedy so emotionally devastating it might drive a person to madness. The two bleed into each other on occasion, but largely they remain at odds. Each minute of one half diminishes the value of the other half; since one half is considerably longer, and comes first, the ending is a cheat. (I'm using the word 'half' loosely, of course.) Rather than building upon the aesthetic and narrative framework they've developed, they choose to abandon it in favor of a climax which cuts short the film's momentum. The climax has a few major issues:

1. It lacks context. Sure, we've been given clues, but these are all retroactive. We do not know his wife or his children. We do not know him, outside of the persona he's developed during the first half of the film. The climax becomes a matter of effect -> cause rather than cause -> effect. It is traumatizing because he is experiencing trauma; he is not experiencing trauma because the event was traumatizing.
2. I mentioned before how banal and obvious the dream sequences are. The climax is worse. Where some memories were revealed in compelling ways while maintaining the ambiguity central to the film, the climax abandons the power of this ambiguity for a scene which is obnoxiously literal. Scorcese thinks he can show us dead children and some blood and that's all he needs to do. That's not how it works.
3. For me, the power of the film rests upon the confusion inherent in Teddy's trauma. When the climax robs us of that confusion, it also robs us of the trauma. Teddy is magically cured and nothing is at stake. The first two hours is spent developing the nuances of Teddy's condition* and the last twenty minutes throw that all away for a climax which has not earned its place in the film.
4. In tone and pace it's so different from the rest of the film, it feels like they've mixed in a reel from another film which happens to have the same actors.
*: Although not thoroughly enough, and I think the limitations of the first half are a direct result of the botched twist ending, which demands that a phony uncertainty must be maintained for the purposes of surprise. I like the ambiguity at times but the film is so long that its structure falls apart as it goes on, and the ambiguity becomes contrived.

I said above that the emotional impact is secondary to plot mechanics, and while that's mostly true I think the first half does manage to contain both simultaneously. It may be an imperfect union, but it feels cohesive and natural in a way that the climax does not.


And Cope, it is true that hysterical tragedy has a long-standing tradition, but these hysterics are tempered by aesthetic qualities. Opera does not employ naturalistic acting like the climax of Shutter Island does. Opera hopes to achieve catharsis through the power of its aesthetic choices. Shutter Island, rather than building on its aesthetic framework (which might work), chooses to pare itself down to raw naturalistic acting. This clashes with the hysterics of the scene, and I'm left with an emotionally barren scene full of dead characters I know nothing about.
Unfortunately I have not seen Twin Peaks, so I avoided that section of your post lest I spoil anything. But hopefully I responded to your argument regardless.

I really appreciate your thoughtful response, karmajuice; it was very thorough and well considered. I know exactly where you are coming from and yet I am fascinated by the fact that what you isolate as the troubling aspects of the picture are the very things I regard as exceptional, the source of its strengths and uniquely profound power.

I do want to address one of your central issues, specifically the tonal incongruities you identified. Obviously I disagree about the success of that final flashback sequence. You say it is marred by the fact that the naturalistic performance style and a lack of sufficient background identification clashes with surrounding context and detracts from our ability to be effected in the way intended. Leaving aside for a moment other possible avenues of argument, such as whether such dissonance may have been what was intended all along or whether in fact the performance style in this sequence can really be said to be all that dissimilar to the rest (I don't believe it is), I want to just champion the sequence as a set piece unto itself. In that sense, sans any context, it is powerful enough. Why is there a need for any additional background info in the face of the trauma depicted? Doesn't it resonate sufficiently with primal horror? And yet I don't wish to imply that Scorsese does anything so crude as to simply show us dead children and some blood as though that's all he has to do. This is not hackwork settling for simple, dramatic shock effect. The development of the scene is slow and careful as the full implications slowly dawn upon Teddy and us. There's a way to coax out nuance even from a hysterical scenario and I believe Scorsese finds it.

But the scene also works because of its context, because of the time we've spent observing and considering what we've seen. And here the film's effect functions on an almost subliminal level as we intuit a sense of the direction this is going before it gets there. We are not all that surprised per se and that's okay. Surprise is transient and tempoarary. What remains is the inevitability of it all--a kind of fated quality to the horrific content, as though there is simply no way to readily reconcile or acceptably comprehend horror of this proportion (the Holocaust analogue is not inappropriate for the heights it points to). It is because this picture works so well as a whole and because all is so successfully synched up (i.e. direction, performance, etc.) that this kind of effect is possible to be reached at all.

Beyond all this, however, I want to get to what makes this really stand out as a great film rather than just an impressive one. And this too has its source in one of karmajuice's primary problems. He says that the style of the ending is simply too far removed from the rest in terms of tone, that the naturalistic performances do not exist in this same world. I would argue that we don't see enough of them at that particular time to know but nonetheless there is a certain truth in what he is noting here and acknowledging it is what allows us to recognize Shutter Island's great accomplishment.

The long and explicit nature of the explanations at the end recalls the end of Psycho, as it should, and also makes the point that this too is another false cosolation, as though a better understanding of and mastery over the specific source of trauma somehow renders it ultimately benign and unproblematic--here we see the parallel with Teddy's own delusional efforts at avoidance, since to be sustained both are strategies enforced through the impostion of savage and willful violence (echoes too of Leonard in Memento). Still, a very valuable aesthetic point slips away because of these twin pursuits.

Scorsese locates in our position as audience a privileged capacity to recognize this something else that all parties miss. Though Teddy's fantasies are most certainly that and do of course provide a certain strategy for coping, they can be seen as more than that. The very clash that pits a naturalistic performance against a scenario of extreme excess is ultimately what makes the transformation possible; it's the source of his faculty for imagination and rearticulating the constituent elements of his experience. This can be turned toward the limitations of pure coping, a drive in this case which is not incidentally presented within the spectacle of a concrete invsetigation with a determined concrete, though spurious answer; appropriate in the sense that such reductive rigor is what coping is all about. It is in this misguided effort, of course, where Teddy errs but not in what was unlocked in him, not in that capacity for imagination.

Within recognizable human experience is the potentiality for it and, as in this case, sometimes it is only unlocked and activated fully under circumstances of extreme distress or unrest when normalcy has been jarred thoroughly away from stabilizing reach. This forces other modes of expression for articulating specific experience and the blessing/curse is in seeing its multifarious forms. The climactic flashback provides the bridge to the rest as it makes the point that experience filtered through heighened forms ultimately is what makes sense of and is congruent with otherwise insane levels of violence and trauma, not in order to neutralize them by making them explicable but to meet them on their own terms, in a climate which accommodates a compehension of them for what they are. Such an affectation matches these ideas and provides the proper mode of engagement.

Teddy's aesthetic self actually represents a valid means of understanding, maybe the only valid one, though one turned toward the dead end of a reductionist logic; not so much a coping device then as a discovery of the apropos means to dialogue with concepts like evil. His breakdown, his transformation from "naturalistic" and untouched, makes that possible. And this, finally, is what the very staff and institution which participate in providing for and sustaining the elaborate alternate reality utterly miss. They wish to wash it away and replace it with a grinding literalism and, eventually, a forced stability (back to naturalism?). They can replace Teddy's aesthetic of mythos with nothing comparably comprehensive or appropriate, nothing which is enough. This is the real secret at the heart of the picture and, in my opinion, the reason for its being.

Nice reading, John Cope, and it chimes with the film's actual ending (and final twist) in the sense that insanity, fantasy and oblivion are seen as preferable to sanity, reality and unbearable pain.

Nice (and mostly positive) review on Ed Howard's blog:

http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2010 ... sland.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Shutter Island out on US DVD and BR 8th June:

http://homecinema.thedigitalfix.co.uk/c ... -june.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Disappointed by the scarcity of the extras (only 2 featurettes?) and the quote Paramount picked for the cover: AICN??
Kim Newman's quote would have been far more appropriate "sumptuous, enthralling, shivery gothic filmmaking with a hardboiled heart".

Mr Finch wrote:Can anyone confirm who the music was by that played repeatedly in the film? Ligeti or Penderecki?

He used Ligeti's Lontano in a couple parts, I can't remember which, I believe the very opening (the same music is used in The Shining, and it kind of relaxed me, like I was greeting an old friend) and the heavy BUH BUH BUH piece is Penderecki's Symphony No. 3 (Amazon goes on to say it's movement IV).

The soundtrack CD tracklisting is on page 4 of this thread, but it may not include all the music from the film.

Someone please remind me never to watch another Dennis Lehane adaptation again. I can't take all the "mind-blowing" third act exposition. Gone Baby Gone was an excellent movie until Morgan Freeman showed up.

Matt wrote:Someone please remind me never to watch another Dennis Lehane adaptation again.

Sam Raimi is making The Given Day (watch out).

Anyone who hasn't bought Shutter Island yet make sure you get the Blu-Ray: not only does it give you a sterling presentation of the film but unlike the barebones DVD it comes at least with two featurettes, the second of which turned out to be surprisingly worthwhile (the first doesn't have quite as much mutual backslapping as feared but it's not particularly in depth either) and with IMO the definitive interpretation of the film's ending. As for the film itself: it holds up to repeated viewings in spite of being too long (can anyone make a case for the scene with Patricia Clarkson? I find it rather redundant as it only reiterates what we already knew) and even after my third viewing (which was some weeks ago) it continued to haunt me for days. Almost certainly the most underrated and misunderstood film of 2010.

Mr Finch wrote:can anyone make a case for the scene with Patricia Clarkson? I find it rather redundant as it only reiterates what we already knew

Do you think this is a case where the scene appears more obvious during repeated viewings, i.e., when you already know where the movie is going? I've only seen the film once so far (although I'm getting closer and closer to pulling the trigger on the BD), but I recall the scene not so much telling me what I already knew but making clear what I had already suspected. It was that scene, more than any other for me, that made it clear that we were not seeing an objective record of events, so to speak. The movie is structured so that it becomes steadily but gradually less plausible as it proceeds, with that scene being the one served as the transition between Teddy's perspective and a more distanced, objective one - meaning that it was then that Teddy's self-deluding hero narrative is irrevocably damaged in the eyes of the audience, and perhaps even to Teddy himself. But when you've seen the movie, and recognize all the signs leading up to that point, then I can see how the scene would seem superfluous.

Mr Finch wrote:can anyone make a case for the scene with Patricia Clarkson?

Does a longstanding desire to marry her count?

Brian C wrote: It was that scene, more than any other for me, that made it clear that we were not seeing an objective record of events, so to speak. The movie is structured so that it becomes steadily but gradually less plausible as it proceeds, with that scene being the one served as the transition between Teddy's perspective and a more distanced, objective one - meaning that it was then that Teddy's self-deluding hero narrative is irrevocably damaged in the eyes of the audience, and perhaps even to Teddy himself.

I see where you are coming from, Brian, but then I thought the earlier scene with Haley in the cell already fulfils that purpose. What I do like is the build-up where Teddy climbs down the rocks after discovering his partner's body down below only for it to disappear when he gets there. I may have to watch the scene in the cave again but to be honest I found it rather unnecessary already when I first saw the film theatrically. That said, that's about the only beef I have with an otherwise cracking film.

why does nobody like Cape Fear around here? i think it's loads better than New York, New York, After Hours, The Age of Innocence and The Aviator

chizbooga wrote:why does nobody like Cape Fear around here? i think it's loads better than New York, New York, After Hours, The Age of Innocence and The Aviator

Well, it might help if you could make a case for the movie.