Shutter Island

Shutter Island (***)

You've probably heard by now that Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island has a big twist at the end, and indeed it does. I'm not going to reveal what it is, but I will say that it's genuinely unexpected, and it has a certain novelty to it, but it stretches the plausibility of what is, up until that point, a pretty engrossing story weaved by the master director and, at the end of the day, I'm not sure the ending being what it is makes it a better movie. I can think of several other movies of recent vintage with similar sleights of hand at work where the big reveal was much more impactful. Here, even though the ending genuinely did catch me off guard my thought afterward was something like, "...Huh. Okay." Though I legitimately didn't see it coming, it didn't really heighten my appreciation for the movie. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start from the beginning.

Our story is set in 1954 and our protagonist is Teddy Daniels. He's a U.S. Marshal who's been sent to the titular island on a case with a partner he's never worked with before named Chuck. Shutter Island houses a facility for the criminally insane, and not much else, save for the dock that gets you there and a bunch of jagged, foreboding cliffs. The two Marshals are investigating the disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solando, which occurred under curious circumstances. The facility's chief doctor, Dr. Cawley--played excellently by Ben Kingsley--says "it's as if she evaporated, straight through the walls". Ben Kingsley's performance might be the best part of the movie. When we're first introduced to him, he seems to exude the same sinister aura that the entire aura around him does, and then at the end, when something different is required from him, he shifts his performance in a way that sells the turn in the story moreso than the rest of the movie does (more on that later). He's perfectly cordial with the detectives, but at the same time he seems to want to impede their investigation if they start asking too many questions not directly related to Rachel's disappearance. Teddy's mistrust for him is heightening by the company he keeps, another doctor on staff who is a German immigrant. Teddy was a soldier in World War II where liberated a death camp, the images of which still haunt him. As such, Teddy is not much of a fan of zee Germans.

Teddy and Chuck's investigation doesn't turn up any solid clues as to how or why Rachel disappeared, but seems to open up whole other questions. Teddy finds a note in her room reading "Who is 67?" and after learning that Shutter Island houses 66 patients, he becomes convinced that the facility is hiding secrets, not the least of which is an extra patient. The investigation of Rachel's disappearance leads nowhere promising, but a massive storm hits the island, preventing the two detectives from returning to the mainland. While he's holed up within the very gothic hospital grounds, Teddy begins to see visions--of his days in the war; of his dead wife, who was killed in an apartment fire set by an arsonist; of the hideously scarred arsonist himself, who Teddy tells us was transferred to Shutter Island from prison. Is the stress of the investigation along with the massive storm battering the island getting to Teddy? Is there something supernatural at work on the island? For most of the movie, we can only speculate. The island is very much in the tradition of gothic "haunted house" locales. Bundle up Arkham Asylum, the House of Usher, whatever the house in The Haunting was called, and a bunch of other stuff, and channel it through the directorial eye of Martin Scorsese and you get Shutter Island. Scorsese paints the island as a living, breathing, 0therworldly entity unto itself, and milks this effect for all it's worth. No better example of the effect Scorsese is going for is the score, which, at times, isn't so much music at it is a series of guttural bellows in the form of extremely low-pitched string chords which almost seem to shake the theater.

Scorsese clearly loves constructing a Hitchcock-esque suspense setting, and for the most part it worked for me. I was genuinely creeped out, and genuinely engrossed by the island and all its myriad secrets, which is why I almost found that the ending, which paints the entire rest of the film in a very different light, almost undermines what Scorsese spends two hours building. A plot of a detective trekking through a mysterious haunted house is pretty derivative, but if there's anything that could make derivative interesting, it's Scorsese working with actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley. Shutter Island is based on a book with the same name, and maybe the ending is handled differently there as it seems to have garnered a fair amount of praise form what I gather Googling it, but here it just seems to muddle an enjoyable movie. Even now as I write this, I'm still very confused as to how some early scenes make sense after the different light cast on the overall story by the ending. In some movies with surprise endings, you immediately want to watch it again and hunt for clues; find what you missed the first time knowing now what you're looking for. With Shutter Island I don't feel that way, rather I feel myself sort of wishing that the scenes were exactly what they appeared to be before everything is shaken up at the very end.

Even with the frustration I have looking back on the movie, I can't say I was ever bored or disinterested for the two hours I was in the theater, hence the review is still ultimately positive. Even working with a somewhat convoluted and confusingly put together script, Scorsese reminds us why he's one of the best directors of all time, even as he steps a bit outside of his normal fare into the realm of supernatural dream sequences and horror movie set pieces. There are a lot of visuals in the film that are still vivid in my head a week afterward, even if the surrounding story didn't quite hold together for me.

Cowboy Bebop Session #5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

After somewhat of a hiatus, I'm back...

I'm just watching a bad dream I never woke up from.

Session 5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

The first image we see coming out of the opening is a man pricking his thumb and signing a letter in blood, continuing with the whole red/blood color theme the series has going. We're at some sort of a meeting of two crime lords (seemingly) forming an alliance. There's an interesting shot where they shake hands, one wearing an all suit, the other wearing all white, with one half of the room bathed in light coming in from the window and the other half obscured in shadow. It creates a yin-yang sort of effect. A few seconds later (I have it paused at 02:12 right now), we get a shot angled from above where we see the bright light outside, while columns in front of the window cast bar shaped shadows on the floor. This is sort of chiaroscuro effect is something you see a lot in noir movies. It's often said to be a metaphor for characters being imprisoned by something--visually their "behind bars." We learn that the man in the black suit is a member of the Red Dragon clan (color theme!). As he watches the other gang faction speed away, suddenly their ship explodes and he turns around to see himself with a sword at his neck. We get our first shot of Vicious walking in from behind, his massive bird squwaking on his shoulder. As Vicious kills the man in the black suit, we cut to a shot of the bird's big blood red eye, then to blood spilling on the floor. With his last words, the man in black insists, "if Spike were here, you would never have done this," and after Vicious smirks we cut to a shot, I guess from somewhere else in the room of a sculpture on the wall with two cherubs. This shot is in the same sort of washed out bluish-gray light as the very first flashback scene back in "Asteroid Blues." Feathers slowly descend across the shot. Then we get the title screen.

On board the Bebop, Spike is lobbying Jet, trying to convince him to pursue a bounty on the head of the Red Dragon clan leader who we just saw get killed. Mao Yenrai is his name, we learn. Faye enters and interrupts their argument, a distraction that Spike uses to leave by himself. Jet is not happy and leaves the room. Faye gets a message about "something big" that's meant for Jet. While doing this, she picks up a ace of spades on the ground from a deck that Spike was shuffling. Not the first time we've seen poker cards. Following the lead, Faye runs off and ends up at an opera. She ends up in Mao Yenrai's box with a gun at her back. Elsewhere, Spike visits a surly convenience store owner who is convinced that he died three years ago. She has a framed photo of Yenrai behind the counter. Spike asks what happened to him. We don't hang around for the answer. Switching back to Faye, she realizes that whoever has her captured at the moment has Mao's body propped up in one of the seats of the opera box. Vicious enters and tells Faye his name. Halfway point break.

Back at the convenience store, the owner, Annie is a bit drunk and telling Spike not to get involved with Vicious while opining about Mao's death. The next scene is Spike back aboard the Bebop, but in between is a are two completely silent shots, one of a stained glass window depicting a heavenly looking scene in a darkened room, followed by the shadow of Vicious bird obscuring the purple-ish light from the window on the floor. On the Bebop, as Spike is getting his various weaponry ready, Jet reveals that he knows Mao is already dead and that Spike would be walking into a trap if he were to go after his bounty. Spike says that he knows but that he "has a debt to pay off." Trying to convince Spike not to go, Jet very vaguely alludes to how he lost his arm by "being too gung-ho." At the end of the series, there will be another scene aboard the Bebop where Spike tells Faye how he lost one of his eyes. That scene will end the same way, with Spike running off to deal with elements of his past. A message comes in from Faye, handcuffed to a pole, announcing that she "kinda got herself caught."

As we switch scenes again, Spike approaches a giant cathedral under cloudy skies, tinted with an eerie purple hue. In between shots of Spike walking in and Vicious crouched down waiting with his big sword in hand, we get glimpses around the cathedral, including several of the stained glass windows from before. Spike gets into a gunfight with Vicious's men. In the commotion, Faye gets away and flees out of the church. Vicious eventually gets Spike pinned down to the ground, and while telling him that he looks like a ravenous beast, we cut to a low-angle shot of a cross somewhere in the cathedral, buried in shadows. Anime directors seem to love throwing in Christian symbolism. Maybe the most well known example is Evangelion, which is steeped with it. Spike shoots Vicious in the shoulder, who simultaneously stabs him in the shoulder. Vicious recovers and throws Spike out of the big circular window. As Spike falls, we continuously see an extreme close up of his fake eye--his red eye--intercut with scenes from his past, some of which we saw at the very beginning of "Asteroid Blues." We see our first real glimpses of Julia, which always seem to be encased in a golden color scheme, contrasting the washed out blue-gray of the rest of Spike's memories. We also at one point see the same shot of the cross again. Spike thinks he hears Julia singing. He wakes up and sees Faye. He insults her singing and Faye slaps him and storms out of the room. In the commotion, Spike ends up with a poker card on his forehead. He picks it up. It's the ace of spades.

As I said, anime directors seem to love throwing in Christian symbolism, sometimes for seemingly no real reason and maybe the use of the symbolism here begins and ends with that. The intercutting of religious symbols with violence, though, is also something that Francis Ford Coppola used to great effect in his crime epics, the Godfather films, notably the baptism scene at the climax of the first film, and the scene where Vito is climbing rooftops to kill the Black Hand as there's some sort of a religious festival going on in the streets. Godfather III (mehhh...) also has an extended opera scene at the end, where a guy ends up getting poisoned and slumps over dead in an opera box. Maybe that inspired the opera scene in this episode, I dunno.