Scorsese heads in new direction to ‘Shutter Island’

A highly-esteemed director’s evolving oeuvre is constantly critiqued and analyzed, but every once in a while he or she should be allowed to have a little unadulterated fun.

For Martin Scorsese, fun means “Shutter Island,” his 1950’s psych-ward detective drama and homage to B-horror flicks, where the protagonist is unironically called “boss” and a wide brimmed fedora fills every corner of the theater’s widescreen.

At a “Shutter Island” press conference, Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Sir Ben Kingsley discussed their descent into the madhouse that resides on the film’s titular location.

Scorsese’s muse DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a U.S. marshal investigating the escape of a patient at the prison-slash-mental institution on Shutter Island, where everyone answers to the quietly domineering Dr. Cawley (Kingsley). A bone-shaking gale, a mysterious lighthouse, and a haunted past contrive to keep Teddy on the island. Nothing is what it seems and Scorsese doesn’t let the audience believe what they’re seeing for a minute.

“The film is very much being publicized as—and is—a thriller in a lot of ways with the surprise ending or with terrifying elements to it, and very much a genre piece,” DiCaprio said at the conference. “But at the end of the day it is what Martin Scorsese does best and that is portraying something about humanity and human nature and who we are as people.”

And DiCaprio is right. The most impressive moments of the film are character driven—heavily psychological and well-acted scenes with DiCaprio, Kingsley, and the rest of the strong supporting cast members—rather than the manufactured “horror” details that come in the form of hallucinations and somewhat misplaced Holocaust imagery.

What is most apparent after viewing the film is Scorsese’s unyielding admiration for the B-horror genres. Equal parts film-buff and director, Scorsese tried to infuse every shot with a little bit of history. The film “draws a lot on a kind of very very long memory of films that I’ve seen and books that I’ve read and music that I’ve listened to over the years,” Scorsese said, citing cult-icon Jacques Tourneur’s “Cat People” and “Out of the Past” as influences. Scorsese humbly gave the B-movie auteur his due: “I can’t reach that level of Tourneur, he was remarkable.”

A more cinematically intellectual and complex film than many blockbuster horror films in recent memory, Kingsley pinpointed what makes Scorsese one of the greatest living directors. “Marty directs like a lover,” he said. “Everything is held together by affection, affection for his craft, affection for his actors, affection for his crew, affection for the material, and affection for the great journey of cinema in our lives.”

But the film was no simple love-fest between those involved. DiCaprio admitted that becoming his complex character were “some of the most hardcore filming experiences I’ve ever had... It was like reliving trauma in a way—it was pretty intense.”

Scorsese agreed. “When you see rain and wind hitting the actors, to the level it’s almost impossible for them to move in the frame, this was a brutalizing experience for them—for everybody,” he said. “This is the way films are made.”

While “Shutter Island” never quite rises to the level of artistry as Scorsese’s already-acknowledged classics “Taxi Driver” and the more recent “The Departed,” it doesn’t really have to. This is a different game. Let Scorsese have his mind-twisting fun. After all the hard work he put into winning his first Best Director Oscar three years ago, he deserves it.