Shutter Island Movie
You’re never sure who’s sane and who’s crazy in “Shutter Island,” Martin Scorsese’s thriller about an isolated mental hospital in the early 1950s. You also have to wonder about Scorsese’s own state of mind while making the worst picture in his long, illustrious career.
His adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel is a disjointed mess that even manages to make Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley look bad. Worse, it’s not even scary. Scenes that are supposed to be terrifying are so over-the-top that they’re laughable.
Scorsese never gets a handle on Lehane’s mystical story about a pair of U.S. marshals investigating the disappearance of a child-killer on a wind-swept island off the coast of Massachusetts.
“Shutter Island” veers off in so many directions -- Cold War conspiracies, Nazi concentration camps and human guinea pigs, to name a few -- and employs so many flashbacks and hallucinatory dreams that it’s almost impossible to follow. Sharper editing, more realistic performances and subtler special effects wouldn’t have solved all the problems, but at least they might have made it watchable.
Scorsese can’t decide what kind of film he’s making -- Hitchcock horror, political thriller or psychological puzzle. So he tries to combine them all, with disastrous results.
All Wet
Here are a few lowlights:
DiCaprio, speaking with a lame Boston accent left over from Scorsese’s “The Departed,” delivering this bit of cornball while searching for his wife’s killer: “He’s here. I can feel him.”
Ruffalo, playing DiCaprio’s fellow marshal, continually calling his partner “boss” in a feeble tone reminiscent of Lennie from “Of Mice and Men.”
Kingsley, as the hospital’s menacing chief shrink, greeting a storm-soaked DiCaprio at a lighthouse supposedly used for dastardly medical experiments: “Why you all wet, baby?”
Speaking of wet, “Shutter Island” may have you reaching for your raincoat. Much of the movie takes place during a fierce hurricane that keeps messing up DiCaprio’s neatly cropped hair.
Frozen Bodies
Adding to the foreboding atmosphere are flashbacks to the Dachau concentration camp, where then-soldier DiCaprio is traumatized by the sight of bodies frozen in the snow. There’s also a dungeon where the most dangerous mental patients are locked up like animals, a mystery woman (Patricia Clarkson) hiding in a cave and a cryptic note left behind by the escapee.
Despite those intriguing elements and an all-star cast that includes Michelle Williams, Max von Sydow and Emily Mortimer, it’s basically a B movie in disguise. You have to go all the way back to “Boxcar Bertha,” a 1972 “Bonnie and Clyde” knockoff, to find a Scorsese film this crude.
Back then, he had an excuse: It was his first studio feature.
“Shutter Island,” from Paramount Pictures, is playing across the U.S. Rating: *
‘Sign My Name’
“Blood Done Sign My Name” is an earnest, plodding drama about a real 1970 murder in Oxford, North Carolina, that triggered a major civil-rights protest. The film’s faults don’t diminish the power of the story.
Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black Vietnam veteran, was beaten and shot by a prominent white businessman and his two sons after he supposedly made a lewd remark to a white woman. The defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury that ignored eyewitness accounts from black residents, setting off rioting in the streets and a peaceful march to the state capital in Raleigh.
The movie is based on a book by Timothy Tyson, the son of a white Methodist minister who preached racial tolerance in Oxford. Former child star Ricky Schroder plays the minister as a beacon of rectitude, while Nate Parker (“The Great Debaters”) is fiery as Ben Chavis, the local civil-rights leader who went on to become executive director of the National Association for the Advancement Colored People.
Admirable as they may be, the characters are one- dimensional. There are also too many heavy-handed speeches, from the pulpit to the courtroom.
Writer/director Jeb Stuart, whose screenwriting credits include “Die Hard” and “The Fugitive,” can obviously relate to the story because he’s a North Carolina native who grew up in the 1960s as the son of a minister. Too bad he couldn’t translate it into a more effective film.