Shutter Island

Seen at: Carmike 10, 4 pm today

I'm jumping this one up in the queue. Just saw it. Need to talk about it.

I was really looking forward to this movie. Standing inline for the matinee on the day of release somehow took me back to movie experiences as a kid, in Iowa. Back then I usually didn't know anything about a movie before I saw it, just like today, going into Shutter Island, even though I'd seen the trailer multiple times. No reviews had yet reached me.

On the way in, I chatted with the manager, then took a seat in the third row in front of some teenagers. It was auditorium 6, which is the best one at the Carmike. The house was nearly full.

For the first twenty minutes I loved this movie. Scorcese making a tight tense thriller? Suprise me by going minimal-classical?

No such luck. By the mid-point of this movie I was incredibly disgusted. At point I was thinking: "how wrong I was, to think that Tarantino's historical revision about World War II would be only a one-movie trend. Now Scorcese is joining that budding genre."

But it got even worse. For one thing, this turns out to be a Holocaust movie. None of the trailers tipped me off, but I'm spilling it here. It's a Holocaust movie. Not that that's bad by itself, but the way it does the Holocaust here is just well...interesting. It basically says it was all our fault somehow (don't ask me who the "our" refers to, because I don't know).

It's also a denialism movie. It says that to believe that Nazi doctors conducted mind control experiments in the U.S. in the 1950s under U.S. government authorization is a fantasy of the diseased mind. I kid you not. This is exactly what the movie suggests.

Well, kudos for at least bringing up the real history of postwar America, Marty, even if you have to dismiss it as lunatic ramblings. Just getting it on screen is important for now. It must be damn hard to make movies lately that tell the truth about anything at all.

My prediction: in the future, historians will look back at Scorcese's later films as the perfect artistic expression of the denialism of our time. It is the denialism of America that cannot face what it has done in the war. It is an America that has started a war in which three million have died and which pretends that the war now is matter of hardly any consequence in our political debate anymore. We have more important things to discuss. This is the mirror of ugliness of falsehoods that Scorcese is holding up to us.

In The Departed, Scorcese gave us complete moral nihilism. Here he gave us complete psychological nihilism.

What next? I'm sure I'll be back in line to see. How can you not look at it?

I forgive Scorcese for making this movie. I'd love to see him do a non-nihilistic movie in the future.

update: it occurs to me that the entire movie was a ripoff of Twin Peaks.

update: the acting in the movie was superb. DiCaprio builds off his character in Revolutionary Road. Best performances were supporting roles, inlcuding ones by Max Von Sydow and Ted Levine (aka Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, but now in authoritarian garb as a prison ward of an insane asylum). I swear that I really wanted hard to like this movie. Scorcese is a master as a director in the technical sense.

update: forgot to mention that I actually booed at the end of this movie (unusual for me), and then got a big laugh when right after Scorcese's name, up comes the title card for the screenwriter, who is someone that I knew back in Austin, and who was a friend of my ex-wife back then. Damn it, is that the way they told you write movies at UT, with that kind of ending? Really? FAIL. [imdb tells me she was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Screenplay in 2004 :( ]