In Contention

Tag: Cape Fear

  • REVIEW: “Shutter Island” (**1/2)

    Shutter Island

    Berlin International Film Festival

    (EDIT: Star rating adjusted upon consideration.)

    To filch an aphorism from Mike Skinner, “Shutter Island” represents of continuation of Martin Scorsese’s decade-long quest to find the hardest way to make an easy living.

    If that sounds like a jab, it’s not. Since the self-amusing personal statements of “Kundun” and “Bringing Out the Dead” perplexed far more than they pleased, Scorsese has weaved over to the middle of the road, flirting with broad Oscar-bait and crowdpleasers (successfully marrying the two in “The Departed”) while playfully maintaining an auteur’s consistency of theme and aesthetic.

    It’s a tricky game to play, and when the elements align, it can work to smashing effect — as in “The Departed,” a nifty pop movie-movie winkingly intended as the prototypical “Scorsese film” that casual cinemagoers attributed to him, but that he’d never actually made.

    When they don’t, however, you get “Shutter Island,” a film awash with beauty and trademark stylistic flourishes, attached to a narrative that he never seems all that into. A near letter-faithful adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s pulpy source novel, itself something of a genre lark for the author, it surprises principally by offering more intrigue as a Scorsese picture than as an entertainment. As an artistic investigation of B-movie construction, it has all the impeccable craft, and a measure of the cinephile intelligence, of “The Departed” or “Cape Fear”; but a lot of the fun is missing.

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  • Shutter Fear

    Anthony B. mentioned the similarities between the “Cape Fear’ and “Shutter Island” posters last week, so I thought I’d toss this up now that Comic-Con craziness has subsided.  Intriguing parallels:

    (from left) Posters for Shutter Island and Cape Fear

  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “Shutter Island” by Dennis Lehane

    Shutter Island by Dennis LehaneDeep into Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel noir “Shutter Island,” there’s a wonderfully telling exchange between the two central characters. Reflecting on the gothic heights to which their situation has spiralled, one observes, “It’s all a bit Grand Guignol, don’t you think?” His partner’s reply: “I don’t know what the fuck that means.”

    Ostensibly a nod to class difference within the narrative, it’s also arguably a tongue-in-cheek dig at the novel’s self-reflexive straddling of high and low culture. “Shutter Island,” of course, is Grand Guignol of the highest order, but with an acute awareness of the term: steeped in references to throwaway pulp fiction and lurid 1950s B-movies, but written with the literary discipline and deference of a serious novelist.

    Needless to say, Boston-ish setting aside (and even then, “Shutter Island” goes to significant dramatic lengths to distance itself from the city), the novel is a very different beast from the two Lehane titles successfully given the screen treatment in recent years. For all their whodunnit trappings, “Gone Baby Gone” and “Mystic River” traded largely in earnest authenticity; “Shutter Island,” by contrast, hinges on artifice.

    Lehane has apparently stated his admiration for Graham Greene’s alternation between “novels” and “entertainments”: this, carefully wrought and quotation mark-enclosed as it is, is plainly his idea of a pure entertainment, a funhouse, a ride.

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