Shutter Island

[Roland]

Ебати великия филм

Като започна, в първите 10 минути имах чувството, че Кубрик прави римейк на собственото си Сияние. В смисъл, олдскуул хорър-мотива в музиката, олдскуул хорър-скачащата камера... Дикаприо е бесен, сънищата и халюцинациите са убийствени, историята е...

...за съжаление твърде предвидима от един момент нататък. Това ми е единственият проблем с филма, но пък финалът успява да компенсира със смисленост.

Но иначе всичко - игра, камера, съспенс, динамика на сюжета. Разбиващ е!

[Trip]

Не съм го гледал, но ето едно яко ревю от Ню Йоркър и две панди ->

Spoiler: show

Rats! Rain! Lightning! Lunatics! Mausoleums! Migraines! Creepy German scientists! Nobody could accuse Martin Scorsese, in “Shutter Island,” of underplaying his hand. The nominal task confronting him and his screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, is to take Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name and render it fit for the screen. Scorsese, however, has a deeper duty—to pillage all the B movies he has ever seen (including some that were forgotten by their own directors), and to enshrine the fixations and flourishes of style on which they relied. In a celebrated riff on “Casablanca,” Umberto Eco wrote, “Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.” “Shutter Island” is that reunion, and that shrine.

The result, set in 1954, has tremendous style of its own. Consider the opening scene, with a boat ghosting out of the fog (or, rather, out of “The Fog”). On board are two U.S. marshals, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new sidekick, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo). They are off to a pleasant spot in Boston Harbor, Shutter Island, which houses an asylum for the criminally insane. We wait for our first view of the place, and wait, and wait. Et voilà: a looming monolith of trouble, clearly twinned with the Skull Island of “King Kong.” The director of photography, Robert Richardson, has an extraordinary knack of allowing physical structures to brood over us, in their solid mass, and yet to hover as ungraspably as a dream.

The boat approaches the dock. “Only way on—or off,” the captain says, adding, “Storm’s coming.” Of course it is. The score then lets out three strong blasts, halfway between string section and foghorn, and reaches a shuddering climax as our hero reaches the gates of the asylum. To me, all this seemed irreproachably comic, but one of the oddities of “Shutter Island”—a film of many mysteries, not all of them bred by the plot—is that, even as Scorsese hurls himself into the crowd of archetypes, there is little or no evidence that he is armed with a sense of humor. But where, pray, are we supposed to place our tongues, at the appearance of Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), if not in our cheeks? The head man—in every sense—of the asylum has a shiny dome, a bow tie, a prissified English accent, and a belief in “the moral fusion between law and order and clinical care.” Pssst. Keep an eye on Dr. Cawley.

The actor who gets the best measure of his surroundings is Max von Sydow, playing a German colleague of Dr. Cawley’s. Ingmar Bergman once spoke of “the subtle detachment which often exists between Max and my madmen,” and that subtlety pays off here, from our first, firelit glimpse of him behind the wing of a velvet armchair. There is, in his performance, a touch of the amused relish that was shown by Boris Karloff, when he, too, oversaw an asylum, in “Bedlam,” the Val Lewton chiller of 1946. You can feel von Sydow weighing the new film in his palm and deciding to enjoy himself—far more so than DiCaprio, who, as Scorsese’s muse of choice, has no option but to frown and bear it.


from the issue
cartoon bank
e-mail this
The marshals have come to investigate the disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a murderess who has, in Dr. Cawley’s words, “evaporated through the walls.” To unravel the plot that follows would put me in the same position as a kitten with a ball of wool, but then Scorsese is gripped less by the lure of the whodunnit than by the maddening spectacle of the whodathunkit. Events are complicated by the flashbacks that plague Teddy: visions of his late wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), who died in a fire at their apartment building, and of the trauma that he underwent in the Second World War, when he was among the soldiers who liberated Dachau. The first of these is a wellspring of terrible beauty—a scene of saturated, almost painful colors, as Dolores clings to him and crumbles to ash in his arms. The Dachau sequences are another matter. It is one thing to conjure a fantasy from a man’s grief; quite another to make aesthetic capital, as Scorsese and Richardson do, out of the heaped and frozen corpses in a concentration camp. You do not have to cleave to Adorno’s thesis—that the writing of poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric—to be vexed by the artfulness of the compositions here, or to ask yourself, What cause do these images serve? Are they exhibits in a sober cross-examining of evil? No, when you come down to it, they are props in a piece of high-toned silliness. People in “Shutter Island” mutter grimly of Nazis and hydrogen bombs, but viewers are not here to see the wounds of history explored. They are here for the heebie-jeebies.

What leads Scorsese to such material? He is scarcely required to prove his expertise; the thrill of watching the marshals blunder through a graveyard during a hurricane, or Teddy tiptoe through Ward C, the maximum-security wing, with light and water dripping from on high and misting spookily underfoot, shows a director in such command of his skills that no pathetic fallacy escapes him. Yet for all the tension of Teddy’s plight, and despite our suspicions that he may not be the sanest soul around (“Pull yourself together,” he says into a mirror in the opening shot), nothing really seems to be at stake here. When Travis Bickle talked into a looking glass, in “Taxi Driver,” you felt the pressure of his solitude, and the threat of his trigger-happiness. The same was true of Jake La Motta, at the close of “Raging Bull,” grunting “Go get ’em, champ” to no one but his own reflection. Those films were written by Paul Schrader, and the blend of his moral brinksmanship and Scorsese’s unshackled visual daring—one man’s agony and another’s ecstasy—has yet to be recaptured. Next to those movies, “Shutter Island” flickers and fades like the lights in Ward C, and, when one of the inmates says to Teddy, “This is a game, and it’s all for you,” he gives that game away—not spoiling the story, just scraping it clean of serious intent.

The final twist is a fizzle; not because we see it coming (though we do) but because Scorsese, with a great weight of exposition dumped in his lap, struggles to keep it snappy. He even has a character stand beside a whiteboard and point out written clues. It’s like having “I Walked with a Zombie” interrupted by “Sesame Street.” When it comes to ripe old frighteners—or to any other overheated genre—Scorsese is the most ardent of proselytizers, so much so that I would prefer to hear him enthuse about Hammer Horror films, say, than to watch a Hammer Horror film. “Shutter Island,” with its remote lighthouse and its spiral staircase, is a fleshing out of these scholarly crushes. That is why we get the patient with the Frankenstein stitches across his facial scar, and the iron-hearted prison warden (Ted Levine) who, during his only conversation with Teddy, informs him that “God loves violence.” These are not quite jokes, but nor are they saddled with dramatic meaning; they are light, rhetorical gestures toward the dark. No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past, but, when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?

[Roland]

Яко, но малко бесайд дъ пойнт, чини ми се. Двете панди обаче са безкомпромисни.

[Vivian]

Боже, знаеш точно КОЛКО ти завиждам в момента, нали?

[dellusion]

Омръзна ми да чакам и изгледах Р5 рилийза. Филма е страшен, мастърпийс. За съжаление един познат ми изръси един голям спойлер, но наистина от един момент нататък е горе долу ясно какво става.

Spoiler: show

Можех да се закълна, че Чък е въображаем. Сцената, в която подаде чашата с вода на оная що годе разумната лелка и как тя отпи се едно от празна чаша. Освен това как все даваше цигари на нашия.

[JaimeLannister]

Изгледах го най- после.
Адски добър наистина.
То на мен всичко свързано с лудници и шизофрения ми е интересно, но този филм е супер добре направен.
Леонардо е луд

[Matrim]

Като никога ще се съглася с общото мнение - филмът е много добре направен, много ме изкефи, но е донякъде предвидим. За щастие, както вече Рол спомена, финалът компенсира с това, че разлика от средностатистическия plot twist ending, този има смисъл.

Spoiler: show

На IMDB като гледам има не знам колко теории, че главния герой всъщност бил нормален, което било големия обрат. WTF? На това му вика аз да търсиш под вола теле.