البـــــوابـــة
Martin Scorsese's latest film, Shutter
Island, is a stylish, artfully made work that establishes a
powerful atmosphere of dread and despair right from its opening minutes,
as a ship emerges from a thick gray fog and U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels
(Leonardo DiCaprio) sweats and shakes while staring into the mirror.
Together with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), they're heading to
the foreboding, forbidding Shutter Island, a combination prison and
mental hospital designed to hold only the most violent and dangerous
mentally ill patients. One of these patients has escaped, and Daniels'
investigation of this mysterious place will be a challenge to his own
sanity. Scorsese's film is an odd, unsettling, potent concoction, at
least for most of its length, even if it's painfully obvious just where
it's heading long before it ever gets there — and even if its inevitable
final act is disappointing in its predictability.
There is a
nicely suggestive idea contained in this final act, nonetheless — and if
it's not obvious by now, it's impossible to talk about this film
without talking about its ending — and Scorsese does manage to make this
resolution heart-wrenching and affecting even as it's also trite and
formulaic. There have been countless films that revolved around the kind
of pat reversal that Scorsese (working from a source novel by Dennis
Lehane) tries to pull off here: see, the marshal was really a patient
all along, and the film's whole convoluted plot, with all its
conspiracies and weird details, was an elaborate attempt by the
hospital's staff to shock Teddy out of his delusions. Of course, this
could only fail to be obvious to those who have never seen a movie like
this before, to those unfamiliar with the generic conventions that
control this kind of movie. The thing is, no matter how familiar this
territory is, Scorsese makes it a thrilling ride to traverse it once
again. Right from the very first scene, it's obvious that something's
up: something seems subtly off about the initial interactions
between Chuck and Teddy, and it's not just the way Scorsese's camera
gently directs attention to mundane acts like the sharing of cigarettes.
We feel that these small gestures, these details, will be important
later; Scorsese's visual cues suggest a mystery that revolves around the
very basic precepts of this situation. It's possible that some may even
guess, already, where this is all heading; it occurred to me, at least.
It almost doesn't even matter, though, as Scorsese makes the
film's introductory scenes so compelling that any explanation seems
unnecessary. There's an air of unreality to these opening scenes that
never quite goes away. The sky behind Teddy and Chuck is somehow too
dramatic, too beautiful with its thick gray clouds and the roiling
water. Few commentators have failed to note the influence of British
filmmakers Powell and Pressburger on this film, but it goes beyond the
post-World War II setting or the handful of dizzying overhead shots
looking down a cliff, directly referencing Black Narcissus. The
stylization, the studio-bound aesthetic of Powell and Pressburger's
lurid fantasies, lingers over this film even though Scorsese's shooting
on location. Shutter Island, as a place, is a fusion of movie
archetypes, a perfect genre location, all dark corridors dripping with
water, flickering lights everywhere, barbed wire, a decrepit old
cemetery, a lighthouse strangely guarded at all hours, where terrible
experiments are rumored to take place. This is a movie-movie, a movie
that's constantly reminding one of other movies, that revels in
its genre conventions and self-consciously keeps pointing them out.
That's certainly apparent in Teddy's troubling visions of Andrew Laeddis
(Elias Koteas), who he believes is a patient here. Laeddis was the man
who Teddy blames for the fire that killed his wife Dolores (Michelle
Williams), but Laeddis is such a sinister, over-the-top movie monster —
with a scar across his face, a milky white eye and a melodramatic leer —
that it's impossible to believe he's a real person. It's obvious from
the start that he's a mental projection, a way for Teddy to avoid the
real truth, whatever it is, about his wife and his past. Koteas plays
this monstrous character with clear delight, relishing the
melodramatics, playing him like Scorsese's Travis Bickle a few years
older and even further gone, twitching and grinning with his deformed
face.
This is the kind of pleasure Shutter
Island offers, and it's not an incidental pleasure by any means.
Scorsese fully adapts to the conventions of the horror genre here,
offering up some rather startling jump scares, like the half-naked
inmate who leaps out of a dark passageway to scream "tag, you're it" and
then races back off into the darkness. The fun here isn't necessarily
in the content but in the execution, the way Scorsese continually does
exactly what one expects but puts his own idiosyncratic twist on it. The
atmosphere of the island, almost constantly overcast, with stormy
weather always looming overhead, is one of slowly creeping dread.
Scorsese further enhances this mood by inserting Teddy's internality
into the film, a mix of visions, dreams and memories: of his wife, of
the woman he's supposed to be finding on the island (played at various
times by Patricia Clarkson or Emily Mortimer), and especially of his
past as one of the soldiers who first walked into Dachau at the close of
World War II. The film is located at this particular historical moment,
in 1954, with the nightmare of the Holocaust not so distant, and
Scorsese does a good job of capturing the paranoia and the terror
generated by this travesty: most particularly, the fear of science as a
monstrous corrupter, responsible for both the hydrogen bomb and the
devilish human experiments of Dachau and Auschwitz. This fear informs
Teddy's own paranoia, his solid belief that terrible experiments are
being performed on the patients on Shutter Island. His rantings,
increasingly unhinged throughout the film, draw from the fear of
Nazism's anti-human sensibility spreading domestically, and from the
kind of distrust of human decency that things like the Milgram
experiments tended to confirm.
Some of that aura of dread comes,
too, from Scorsese's soundtrack selections. He's assembled a compelling,
complex soundtrack in which the music, frequently grating and eerie,
seems to emanate from the harsh terrain of the island itself.
Challenging classical and modernist music by John Cage, Gustav Mahler,
Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki and John Adams is
omnipresent here, solitary notes and clusters of notes hovering in the
still, damp air, occasionally interrupted by the piercing screams of the
inmates. Scorsese's use of sound here is as compelling, as sensitive,
as his more familiar pop music soundtracks in Mean Streets or Goodfellas.
The music is so dense, so intense in its effect, that the moments of
silence, the moments where the music cuts away to reveal a profound and
empty quiet, hit as though all the air had been suddenly sucked away,
leaving behind this awful vacuum. The complexity and eerie beauty of
this soundtrack is often matched by the quality of Scorsese's images,
which have a kind of processed grandeur that one associates with the
Technicolor era, another reason the Powell/Pressburger comparisons are
so salient. At one point, flickering flames slash up across the screen
like fragments of Brakhagian light and color, as though Scorsese were
superimposing this kind of experimental light study atop his images,
playing across the faces of the actors. Even Scorsese's judicious
application of CGI is affecting, and eerie: a shot where Teddy embraces
Dolores in a vision, only to have her turn to ash and burn away, is
devastating. The ash, often raining down around Teddy in the nightmare
visions that haunt him, represents both the fire that killed his wife,
and the human ashes that often rained from the smokestacks of the death
camps when the ovens were running.
As powerful as the film often
is, its final act is clumsy and uneven, delivering exactly the expected
payoff and relegating way too much time to the hospital psychiatrist
Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) laboriously explaining the whole thing. If the
rest of the film is affecting and off-kilter, packed with compelling
imagery, the finale switches gears for a succession of talking heads
spelling out the entire plot. The film is a mood piece where the mood is
abruptly disrupted in the last act. Nevertheless, even here Scorsese
crafts some stunning sequences, particularly an absolutely horrifying
flashback in which Teddy finally remembers, or understands, what
actually happened to his wife. Still, there's an unavoidable aura of
disappointment throughout the final scenes, a sense that Scorsese had
abandoned the film's visual richness and imagination for a rote series
of psychological explanations and diagrams, a nod to Psycho
with Kingsley in the role as the psychologist profiler, diagramming and
lecturing about the film's plot. If the rest of the film provides
evidence of Scorsese's visual and emotional deftness, this ending
perhaps suggests the limits of his imagination.
لا يوجد حالياً أي تعليق