“Shutter Island” (2010)

There are a lot of good things in Martin Scorsese’s latest, the psychological thriller “Shutter Island”.  Robbie Robertson’s score, for one.  Robertson seems to be channelling Bernard Herrmann, going wonderfully over the top from the very beginning.  The music in the opening sequence - seemingly nothing more than shots of Leonardo Di Caprio and Mark Ruffalo arriving and driving through the title location - screams with a vigour reminiscent of the climax of “Vertigo”.  It certainly sets the tone.

The acting, as you might expect, is also first rate.  Scorsese’s reputation as the best means he has his pick of performers.  Di Caprio is now an established collaborator of the same order as Robert De Niro and his work in “Shutter Island”, as a 1950s US Marshall nominally investigating the disappearance of an inmate from a mental institution who comes to question his own sanity, is solid.  He is well supported by the now typecast Ruffalo (playing yet another cop), Ben Kinglsey (in the sort of part Leo G Carroll used do in his sleep for Hitchcock: the institution’s benevolent chief psychiatrist), Max Von Sydow (a vaguely Nazi administrator), Michelle Williams (Di Caprio’s dead wife, who speaks to him in dreams), Jackie Earle Haley (a creepy inmate), and so on.

There are great moments.  Di Caprio scaling a rock face and climbing lighthouse stairs is all very Hitchcockian.  Unsettling scenes of butchered children staring plaintively from the afterlife are reminiscent of Kubrick’s “The Shining.  A plague of rats brings to mind Herzog’s “Nosferatu”, if not Murnau’s.  Holocaust flashbacks lean a bit on Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”.

What’s missing is a script tight enough to tie all these disparate references together or an atmosphere sufficiently consistent to pull off the ludicrous plot devices. It is in fact a bad sign that the influences are as obvious as all this: as encyclopedic as Scorsese’s knowledge is of cinema he usually does not indulge in anything as obvious as a direct homage.

Without giving away “Shutter Island”’s central secret the recent film that it is most close to is “The Machinist”.  While that neo noir classic similarly wore its influences on its sleeve it also managed to sustain a dark and subjective mood, effectively blurring the line between what is actually going on and what its troubled protagonist thinks is going on.  Unfortunately you cannot say the same for “Shutter Island”, which is too long and ill focused to put across the same essential conceit.

It’s evident that Scorsese loves Hitchcock movies.  The Master of Suspense got away with some unlikely stories, to say the least: analyse “Vertigo” from a rational point of view for even a couple of minutes and it falls apart.  That “Shutter Island” strains to achieve like success, even with the theme of a disintegrating personality that’s borrowed from “Psycho”, proves how inimitable old Hitch was.  At least the ending, with its shades of “Angels With Dirty Faces”, comes as a pleasing surprise.  For the most part though “Shutter Island” feels like Scorsese doing De Palma doing Hitchcock, like three day old genius warmed over in a cinematic microwave.