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Shutter Island I
guess we all run out of money sooner or later, and
evidently Martin Scorsese just went through that himself, otherwise why in
the world would he have agreed to direct “Shutter Island”? “Shutter Island” is one of
those ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’
films that have no reason for being other than to show how smart you are and
how dumb we are. Made
from the novel by Dennis Lehane, it shows us two Federal Marshals arriving at some
kind of government jail on an island off the Massachusetts coast, for
‘the worst of the worst,’ as they are told upon arrival –
murderers, including one woman who drowned her children and then was
immolated when a firebug torched her house. Oh, and did I forget to mention that
she was the Marshal’s wife?
How thoughtless of me. And
now she’s somehow escaped this locked facility. The Marshals – Leonardo Di Caprio and Mark Ruffalo –
are there to help find her. There
are some strange things going on, including an early shot of a lighthouse up
on a hill, that somehow moves down onto a rocky
island in the sea the next time we see it. It does stay there, however, with no
means of access, except that that’s where all the experimental
lobotomies are performed. The
patients evidently swim to their island rendevous. However, I digress. Di
Caprio puts on a Boston accent, something he
apparently got from watching “Good Will Hunting,” but his partner
Ruffalo, whom we are told comes from Seattle, also
tries a Boston accent, and misses badly. In
any case, things go from bad to worse; first, there’s a hurricane, then
the ferry to the mainland stops working, then Dr. Ben Kingsley, the head of
the place, is strangely unresponsive to their questions, then another doctor,
Dr. Naehring – played by Max von Sydow, you remember from “The Seventh Seal”
– seems to have been a Nazi concentration camp experimentor. So along with the blown-down trees,
the red herrings pile up and up until we can’t see over the top of them
anymore. So
now we must ask ourselves: what in the world is going on? My own lips are sealed, of course, but
“Shutter Island” is the kind of film that actually bogs down as
we get to the final solution (no pun intended) instead of speeding up. And you and I have lots of time to
guess at the secret of “Shutter Island.” Use it wisely. |