No Martin Scorsese film is without interest, but I doubt that his latest, Shutter Island, will ever be ranked with his best work: among other things, it's overloaded with way too much expository dialogue and way too many plot points, most of them red herrings. Still, its clammy atmospherics do get under your skin, and its core concern—guilt and the defenses we construct to deny it—is fairly compelling, as Scorsesean a theme, certainly, as in anything he's done.* I was never (well, rarely) bored by it, for it contains more than enough of the director's signature pyrotechnics to sustain interest. Here his formidable command of the medium encompasses a hurricane, hallucinatory flashbacks, and a climactic quest through a cavernous, chamber-of-horrors asylum.
On the other hand, those very pyrotechnics and Scorsese's propensity for grand spectacle—his operatic impulse, I'd call it—make me a bit wistful for those past occasions when he worked on a smaller scale, within tighter budget constraints and without so much razzle-dazzle. I'm thinking here of films like The King of Comedy (1982) and, reaching back further, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). Within the last twenty years, however, it seems that every feature Scorsese has done (excluding his documentary work) has had to be outsized, larger than life. Whether the spectacle is violent, as in Gangs of New York and The Departed, or genteel, as in The Age of Innocence, Scorsese seems doggedly determined to blow us away—through flashy cutting, swooping camera movements, sudden shifts to slow motion, portentous camera angles, what have you. For just a film or two, I'd like to see him deliberately restrain himself and demonstrate once more that he can be entertaining and thought-provoking without always having to overwhelm us.
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* That theme, of course, comes by way of Dennis Lehane's novel, which Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogrisis adapted quite faithfully. Kindred spirits all, I suspect.
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