I actually think that particular scene served its purpose well. It’s when “Teddy” really began to have his break with reality, when his delusions became foregrounded and reality became muddled and lost. The camera lingers with Teddy so long, marking each step in his decision making process, that as viewers we don’t have any chance at objectivity. There’s no way “in” to say that Chuck absolutely didn’t fall off the cliff, to say that the intake form didn’t almost fly away, to say that the rats weren’t really there, and finally to say that he didn’t really meet with Rachel. It’s only in hindsight that we see that all or nearly all of things we were shown didn’t actually happen. That section didn’t drag. That section showed us what it was like to see the world through Teddy’s eyes and live his delusion.
Also, I think that whole sequence, from the moment he walks away from Chuck to the moment he is picked up in the Jeep, owes a great deal to Hitchcock. You mention suspense, but Hitchcock, the master of suspense, shot long sequences exactly like that. In a few places, it even looked like a shot Hitchcock would have put together, especially when he’s down near the water.
But I’m not convinced he was going for suspense at all. I don’t think that this is a suspense/horror film anymore than Taxi Driver was a crime thriller or Raging Bull was a sport movie. It’s placed inside a specific genre for expedience’s sake, but Scorsese wouldn’t have considered himself restricted to the current language and expectations of that genre. That’s part of what makes his films so great, IMHO. He is a scholar of film and probably knows more than all of us in this thread put together, and he’s comfortable moving beyond generic boundaries to tell the stories that he’s interested in telling.
Finally convinced my friend to see this with me. He had been put off by what seems like an excessive amount of advertising (which I guess paid off - the movie opened fairly strong - although I can’t figure out how it cost $80 million!). I have to say I enjoyed it for the most part, although of course,
As noted in my earlier post, I guessed the basic twist from the trailer. But to it’s credit, up until he fired the gun, I wasn’t convinced I was right - and also, the final twist of him pretending to revert was brilliant and chilling.
Although it’s a conventional technique, the twist was a common trope anyway so I think it would have been good - right after he realizes what really going on and has his tragic flashback, it would have been nice to also have brief flashes of the events of the movie itself from the perspective of reality - him handing over a fake gun, talking to no one in the cave, etc. Similar to how in Fight Club we see the main guy fighting with the air instead of Tyler Durden…It would have been interesting to see which things were ‘real’ and which were hallucinated…
And yet all but one of his films in his entire career managed to be shorter than Shutter Island.
And to assume that everyone who complains about movie length suffers from ADD is a reductive response to a legitimate criticism. Some movies need to be played out slowly and benefit from taking a methodical, even leisurely, pace to suit its specific purposes.
But not every film. Some films are just too long–symptomatic of directors who feel that everything they want to express is worth expressing. Valuing economy in storytelling is a good thing, and suggesting judicious cutting is sometimes more than kneejerk impatience. And even as good a filmmaker as Scorsese is not immune to indulgences.
My bookclub read the book last month, so went to the movie this month, and we’d probably have liked the movie a lot better if we hadn’t already read the book. Instead of sinking into the plot, most of us spent the time spotting the fair play clues from the book. Well, that and whispering snark comments about whoever overproduced the soundtrack.
We universally did not care for the ambiguity of the last line in the movie. It had ‘studio note’ written all over it.
Pretty good film. Am I the only one who thought it borrowed very heavily from:
Angel Heart? Right down to the lead character having a phobia relating to his forgotten past. I noticed it also borrowed from The Sixth Sense the little touch of having something bright red in the room when his wife’s “ghost” appears. And it borrowed from L.A. Confidential by using the song Wheel of Fortune (Kay Starr) to creepy effect.
I guess I’m saying Scorsese borrowed quite a lot for this film. Still very entertaining.
A Beautiful Mind, with the imagined government conspiracy and the fully-realized imagined characters and the psychosis-from-the-inside approach.
Also, Dachau was liberated on April 29, not in the dead of winter as depicted in the film. This was also a clue (albeit an obscure one) that Teddy’s memory of the event was not reliable.
Or maybe it was just artistic license. The falling snow echoed the falling paper and later in the film the storm-blown debris.
Oh, I know Dachau had one (many of the camps did), but the fact that he “remembered” the sign as the one from Auschwitz (which is more famous) indicates that his memories were less than reliable.
Either that or the cinematographer / director thought no one would know the difference…
I saw the film this afternoon and also noticed the Arbeit Macht Frei sign as being out of place. I hope the shot of that sign was added on purpose to show the unreliability of the memory, because as soon as he said he was at Dachau, I thought it was a huge gaffe on part of the filmmakers, like they think Americans wouldn’t get that it was the Holocaust unless they showed that sign.
jacquilynne, thanks for bringing that up - the soundtrack was bombastic, wasn’t it? My husband and I rolled our eyes at each other whenever they ratcheted it back up to 11 again. Really takes you out of the movie.
A Guardian blog essentially suggested a “Hitchcock bingo” drinking game for watching Shutter Island. Personally, the Psycho shower-head and Spellbound gun-view references leapt out as blatently deliberate. I did wonder to what extent Scorsese was signalling the suggestion that most of Hitchcock’s material was just such nonsense and he was a genius, remember?
The film did seem slowly paced given the story. DiCaprio just spends an awful lot of time thrashing around, getting nowhere. Given the solution, this is technically justifiable, but it doesn’t feel like that as the plot unfolds. Thus the script sets up a classic “locked room” mystery, which it only solves by dismissing it. Since quite a lot of the set-up reminded me of The Name of the Rose, I was struck by the thought that at least Eco would have played fair to the extent of providing some solution to that puzzle. This might have turned out wrong in the grander reality of the plot, but he would at least have confused matters by having the detective figure out how it could have happened. As it is, the film basically just mystifies until the ending.
Which is then exactly the one that I had suspected from the trailler.
The surrounding mechanics did distract from his performance on first viewing, but I suspect it’s actually a hell of a bit of work from DiCaprio.
I finally saw this and my initial judgment is that this is definitely lesser Scorsese. The last 1/4 are rather muddled.
One thing I wonder about. If “Teddy’s” government-backed mind control/brainwashing conspiracy is his delusion, what was his source for the fantasy? The story is set in 1954 and “Teddy” has already been there for two years. Were there any allegations or stories in the media about such experiments being conducted with the CIA’s or FBI’s involvement during the early 50s? I could be wrong but it was my understanding that this information wasn’t found out by the public until years later.
The falling snow echoed the falling paper and later in the film the storm-blown debris.