2-25-10 Movie Review: Shutter Island

Two noncommercials, tonight and tomorrow night.

Tonight at 6, Black Films That Challenge/Black Films That Matter is showing one of the most thoroughgoing portrayals of ordinary people living ordinary lives that I have ever seen, Nothing But a Man, very seldom seen since its initial release in 1964. It's the story of a quite unexeptional young black man in the South and his dubiously successful attempt to live with some dignity under white suppression. There are no Hollywood concessions whatsoever, but also no Hollywood melodramatics; I don't have the knowledge to restify to accuracy, but the picture is 100% convincing and a little horrifying, without any heroics and with no false hope. There must have been millions who lived like this, and the thought is hard to live with. That's Nothing But a Man, 6 tonight in 210 McKnight Art Center at WSU. And tomorrow at 7:30, the Murdock Theatre at 536 North Broadway continues its French series with A Man and a Woman, from 1966, directed by Claude Lelouch, with Anouk Aimee and jean-Louis Trintignant, all three nominated for Oscars, and the movie won one. It's quite a simple love story, credited by Leonard Maltin with an "intelligent script, winning performances, innovative direction and camerawork." That's 7:30 tomorrow in the Murdock.

And commercially, we have Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island, which isn't up to comparison with either of the above.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a very disturbed federal investigator sent to look into the escape of a prisoner from the Shutter Island prison hospital for the dangerously insane, and right away you may be suspicious that something odd is under way. Since the hospital is on an island that nobody could escape from, there are a good many guards, and the prisoner escaped just a day ago, you might wonder why outside help has been so quickly sent for; hospital bosses Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow don't seem in any hurry to cooperate with DiCaprio, and the others at the hospital seem downright hostile. Considering the nature of the case, it seems odd that DiCaprio has a brand-new sidekick, Mark Ruffalo, who develops a pretty paranoid theory before too long. I don't want to go further into the main plot except to testify that when we got to the end over two hours later, I was satisfied that it did hang together the way mystery stories are supposed to and was no more incredible than modern thriller plots tend to be. I must admit that later I got to developing questions, like how anybody could be sure DiCaprio would see the body under the cliff; but maybe i missed something.

That would be easy to do, because everything is tangled up and deceptive, what with DiCaprio's having helped liberate World War II death camps and never gotten over it, having lost a wife he can't get out of his mind, and in general showing signs of serious mental or at least emotional disturbances that are illustrated by dreams and memory flashes, and a lot of what we see maybe reflecting his paranoid reactions as much as what really happened. He seems to be hallucinating sometimes, and his mind flashes don't always match what we learn from more conversational sources.

I suspect that Shutter Island is Martin Scorcese's idea of a psychological horror movie, but it came across to me more like an action mystery with spooky elements too obviously standard -- spooky settings, darkness, enormous creepy old stone buildings, wandering mad people, sinister doctors -- stuff like that. You won't be bored, despite Shutter Island's length; but I think there is less to it than meets the eye.