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Shutter Island just might be the best B-movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a potboiler, a pulp tale. That’s not a slam at Scorsese’s film. On the contrary, I suspect that’s exactly what he was aiming at with this lurid, overblown 1950s-set psychological thriller, and he manages to make it both wryly genre-savvy and completely thrilling — even to someone who knows its secrets.
[The first half of this review is spoiler-free. I've placed a bolded note where spoilers begin below.]
The film opens with Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) en route to Shutter Island, an isolated island asylum for the criminally insane, to investigate the seemingly impossible disappearance of a female patient. Head psychiatrist Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley) treats the scowling agents to a lecture on his philosophy of compassionate, comforting treatment for even the most dangerous patients. His claims of compassion notwithstanding, Dr. Cawley is an oddly ambiguous, potentially sinister character, with his big knowing eyes and his capriciously high-handed treatment of the marshals.
We know almost immediately that Daniels carries dreadful memories with him to the island: Teddy brusquely tells his new partner that his wife died in an apartment fire. As the film progresses, we learn, too, that Daniels, a WWII veteran, was a liberator of Dachau, and images from the camp haunt his sleep.
Some negative reviews have focused on the plotline, which seems to me to be missing the point. The beauty of Shutter Island is the storytelling, not the story. The almost perfunctory twists and turns of the plot are thrown into deep shadow by the long, lavish, genre-loving narrative process.
The very first exterior shot — the green-screen shot of Teddy and Chuck on the ferry with endless ocean in the background — establishes this film as a homage to the suspense tales of yesteryear. It’s a more technologically advanced version of the jumping, jarring backdrops Hitchcock used in his driving scenes — almost naturalistic, but not quite.
Throughout the film, Scorsese pays homage to sources higher and lower than Hitch, making Shutter Island a chaotic pastiche of influences, including classic psychiatric thrillers Spellbound and Vertigo, psychiatric melodramas like The Snake Pit, Cold War paranoia ranging from The Manchurian Candidate to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the rich tradition of modern horror from Samuel Fuller to David Lynch.
And “chaotic” is the word to take to heart here. Scorsese masterfully builds up a fractured, fragmented narrative, filling it with blinking inconsistencies that vanish before we can consciously view them. The whole film seethes with chaos and turmoil: an almost parodically craggy landscape, a storm that builds to a devastating climax, great wafts of smoke, the varied and vivid torments of the island’s inmates, lighting that goes waaaay past contrast and into chiarascuro, and a towering soundscape of a score. When bright clear calm finally does descend over the island, it’s anything but comforting.
From this point on, you’ll find [spoilers]:
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Miller’s Crossing, by the Coen Brothers.
It’s Chicago during Prohibition, and Tom is causing trouble. Again.
The leaders of two rival gangs, Leo O’Bannon and Johnny Caspar (Albert Finney and Jon Polito), clash over a small business matter: should a small-time bookie (John Turturro) be killed or protected? This seemingly simple proposition gets indescribably complicated, as the ties between the characters get unearthed.
The whole story revolves around the efforts of Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), O’Bannon’s right-hand man, to ease tensions the only way he knows how: persuading Leo to let him kill that guy, already. But nothing is ever that simple, not in noir and not in a Coen Brothers’ film.
The twisty-turning plot feels a little bit like two noirs woven together… and I intend that as a compliment. As always with Coen Brothers’ period pieces, the background is spectacular, in that unspectacular noir-y way: richly designed and fully believable houses, offices, flophouses, and cars; period costumes that look lived-in instead of costume-y; the snappy patter that flows off everyone’s tongue; and always — in the office, in the hallway, in the alley — the shadows, looming.
But there’s more here than you’ll find in the average noir: a depth, a sorrow, a richness of metaphor that makes Miller’s Crossing a stand-out, even in the Coens’ oeuvre.
Aspiring comic Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro) has one dream: to meet late-night TV host Jerry Langford (played with startling acuity by Jerry Lewis) and, through him, to achieve fame. The problem: he has no experience, no bookings, no stand-up act… except the one he’s practiced in his mother’s basement for years.
Pupkin doesn’t see that this might be a problem. He believes, with the fervent belief of the slightly mad, that if he can just meet Jerry, everything else will miraculously fall into place. His only friends are similarly starstuck and mad (particularly notable is Sandra Bernhard as another stage-door stalker), and they only reinforce his loony certainty, giving him a curious air of confidence.
Revisiting Scorsese’s underwatched film The King of Comedy, I saw that it was a perfect companion piece to his much-lauded Taxi Driver. Once again, Scorsese and DeNiro conspire to create an indelible portrait of a man obsessed.
Indeed, King of Comedy presents a
hellishly complete anxiety by repressing every chance for emotional release; where Taxi Driver offers moments of recognizable violence and vulgarity to relieve the audience’s building tension, King of Comedy simmers with a terrible submerged anger and a deep sense of dread. The plot unfolds with excruciating deliberation and dreadful humor that only Scorsese could deliver. This movie is all about the power of the pathetic and the pathological, and — boy oh boy — does it deliver.
At a time when we’re steeped in Christmas classics, it’s tempting to explore the underbelly of holiday films: Christmas movies that don’t feel like Christmas*. Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s controversial final film, is perhaps the least family-friendly of the bunch, unless your kids love meandering tales of urban misadventure, marital strife, and secret sexual cabals of rich, powerful men and doped-out supermodel types.
After a disturbing evening at a wealthy client’s holiday party and a disillusioning argument with his beautiful wife (Nicole Kidman), Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) wanders around the streets of New York in a fit of jealousy and envy. It’s never quite clear, however, what sparks his jealousy: his wife’s fantasy revelations or the sexual power his client wields. Bill all but sleepwalks through the film, which is a vague, quasi-sexual odyssey of frustration and missed connections, all shot against the background of a city festooned with holiday ornaments.
Though Eyes Wide Shut was promoted as an erotic thriller, it is anything but; it’s a dark examination of class and economic power. Even the Christmas trimmings and tinsel show the economic core of the film: the contrast between the lush decor of the upper-crust homes and the pathetic glimmer of downmarket locales speaks louder than words could do.
With its emphasis on the transactional dynamics that plague modern society, about the ways we try to buy and sell each other’s attention and affection… hey, it just may be a modern American Christmas movie after all.
* Tis the season… to be fed up with tinsel and carols, with bustling crowds and brimming cups of nog. If you’re exhausted from the holiday whirl, relax with these seasonal films that take place at Christmastime but are decidedly un-Christmassy. Here are a few more:
The Lion in Winter
Die Hard
Brazil
Holiday
The Shop around the Corner
Toy Story
Doubt
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Better Off Dead
The Apartment
The Proposition
Eyes Wide Shut
Meet John Doe
Twelve Monkeys
Three Days of the Condor
The Conversation
Bell Book and Candle
Gremlins
Diner
The Thin Man
Trading Places
Edward Scissorhands
The Ref
The Ice Harvest
Less Than Zero
The Matador
With the recent snowfall, I’m starting to get in the holiday spirit. Today, I’m celebrating a little early with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places. There’s nothing like betrayal, penury, and revenge on the Wall Street bigwigs to give life that Christmas twinkle!
Louis Winthorpe III (Aykroyd) is a privileged and successful executive in a ritzy brokerage house, but his even-more-privileged bosses (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy) wonder if his success is due to his own efforts or to his upbringing and surroundings. With the callous insouciance of the mindbogglingly wealthy, they use Winthorpe’s life and livelihood as a the basis for a brotherly bet: toss him out of his envied position, ruin his reputation, and see if he sinks or swims. In his place, they groom street grifter Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy), a smart cookie with little formal education and a mismatched set of social skills, but loads of charisma and life experience.
The plotline is silly and in other hands could easily be stilted and predictable or become a dismissive and superficial buddy comedy, but Murphy and Aykroyd make the whole thing hum along like a beautiful machine. And a machine it is; the film’s clockwork structure owes a good deal to the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, and particularly to the social-class comedies like The Lady Eve or My Man Godfrey.
Trading Places is also a buddy movie, and it’s marvelous to watch Aykroyd and Murphy let their incompatible types find the niches and nooks of compatibility between them. They inhabit their characters so fully, imbue them with real depth and intelligence and humor, never letting them feel like caricatures or plot vehicles. The story does deal with a great many racial and social stereotypes, and imperfectly acknowledges them as stereotypes, but the central parts are so marvelously cast, so intensely alive and real, that I can forgive it its failings.
Also, it’s freakin’ funny, so there’s that.
update: The Fella picked up my review his weekly new-release column with Justin Ellis of the Portland Press Herald. You can read their full column here and here.
Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia (to be released on DVD next week) melds together two disparate tales: Julia Child’s posthumously published memoir of her culinary education, and Julie Powell’s blog-to-book account of a year cooking her way through Child’s encyclopaedic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, V. I & II (co-written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle).
It should surprise no one that Meryl Streep was the choice to bring the larger-than-life Julia Child to the screen. Of all actors working today, only Streep could hone her voice and mannerisms to echo the unique rolling giggle, the highs and lows, the familiar and beloved songbird voice of Julia Child.
What is surprising: how marvelously Streep captures Child’s essence: the vim, the brio, the joie de vivre and jolly bravado that Julia Child brought to all her public enterprises… and how beautifully the film peeks into the vigor that she brought to private life, as well. Streep’s Julia Child embraces life with a cheeky, boisterous air and a sexy sauciness that extends beyond the kitchen. Rarely has the screen seen a couple as frankly and believably in love as Julia and Paul (Stanley Tucci), her dapper diplomat husband.
Indeed, the whole film is filled with canny casting choices. Watching Jane Lynch and Meryl Streep crowing and groaning and giggling together, you can easily believe them as sisters. Chris Messina plays Julie Powell’s loving but ill-treated husband, and he transforms the thankless doormat role into something both earnest and wryl.
Then there’s the biggest casting trick of all: Amy Adams as Julie Powell. Adams brings twinkle and cuteness to a part that is, frankly, pretty unsympathetic: Julie Powell’s writing voice is blankly self-involved, entitled, and whiny, simultaneously resentful of the task she had set herself and and ignorant of its depths. Amy Adams takes all those attributes and wraps them up into an almost lovable package of spunky determination and colorful failures, bringing a taste of sweetness and a bit of backbone to a shrill, unlikeable character.
In a break from his usual heist-and-hostility routine, David Mamet brings us a movie about movies: temperamental talents, deeply hidden secrets, and the panic of production delays. The premise: the entire cast and crew of Hollywood production The Old Mill has been booted out of the small New England town where they’re filming. As the frantic director tries to hustle another town’s mayor into signing on as their new location, the clock is ticking away. And time is money, people.
Writer-director David Mamet’s dialogue is pointed, clever, witty, and utterly despicable. With its quick, smart humor and characters running the range from “wretchedly angst-ridden” to “utterly vile,” State and Main feels like an Aaron Sorkin show set in Hell. William H. Macy plays director Walt Price with whiplash virtuosity, slipping effortlessly between unctuous gladhanding and vicious rants. Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in another masterful performance as the first-time screenwriter improvising like mad despite his almost total lack of confidence; Hoffman takes the sad-sack role and transcends it. Alec Baldwin delivers one of his nastiest comic roles as the big-name movie star with a loathsome yen for under-aged girls.
And here’s a sneaky little in-joke: the small-town mayor (perfectly played by Charles Durning) is named George Bailey — a poke at Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. As Mamet no doubt knows, Capra’s view of small-town life was far from the whitewashed sentimentality we celebrate in the film today. It’s a Wonderful Life gave us a glimpse of village life’s underbelly, and State and Main would like to pick up where Capra left off, plunging farther into the ghastly depths than Capra ever dreamed. With its vicious wit, its depravities, and its rapid-fire plot complications, State and Main is a screwball comedy of the darkest shade.
Vividly textured, richly ambiguous, and darkly comic, Delicatessen opens in a ramshackle tenement hazily located in a French town in some unspecified dystopian future. Food is scarce, yet the butcher shop occupying the building’s first floor never seems to feel the pinch too badly.
I think you see where this is going… but the new tenant does not. His name is Louison (played by oddly charming rubber-faced actor Dominique Pinon), he’s a former circus performer, and he delights the neighborhood children with his clowning antics, which are cartoonishly impressive. Indeed, all of Delicatessen has a cartoonish quality that meshes weirdly but successfully with its grubby, dark setting and its gruesome premise.
This is the first feature film of co-directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who also co-directed the great City of Lost Children. Jeunet is now perhaps best known as the director of Amélie, and it’s easy to see Amélie as the indirect descendant of the grotesqueries of Delicatessen. Both films immerse themselves in a whimsically embroidered narrative built around the laborious quirks of its characters, and does so with an aplomb that magically weaves a potentially overwrought, incoherent mess into a beautifully balanced composition of humor, compassion, sorrow, and wonder.
Not only is Sesame Street turning 40 this month, Wallace and Gromit turn 20! Many happy returns of the day!
Elli
Elsa