ON FILM: Masterpiece or arty B film, both viewpoints are honest

By Philip Martin

Posted: February 26, 2010 at 3:56 a.m.

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LITTLE ROCK — The other day someone forwarded me a link to a review of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island that proclaimed it “the best movie of the year.” And I thought, well, OK, it’s only February, he’s got a point; Shutter Island may verywell be the best movie of the year so far.

But that’s not what the critic, Rick Florino of the Artist Direct Web site (www.artistdirect.com), says in the piece. He believes the movie “will go down in cinematic history ... [t]o say that Shutter Island is the best film of the year would be an understatement. Not only is it one of the best films of the decade, it’salso one of the best of Scorsese’s storied career. It’s because Shutter Island truly pushes boundaries in terms of filmmaking, performance, storytelling and feeling. Yes, you will feel this film.”

Florino certainly did. He goes on to favorably compare Shutter Island to The Red Shoes and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Hell, he invokes Picasso and argues that one of the film’s many dream sequences makes for “an Inferno even Dante couldn’t imagine.”

I’ve had my say about Shutter Island already. I thought it was a curiously ambitious B movie that was probably a lot more fun for Scorsese to imagine than it was to watch. I didn’t buy Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, I thought it made a fetish of certain film noir tropes, and that it wasted a lot of energy with what ultimately turned out to be occluding exposition. Scorsese took a big swing - and missed.

There’s no shame in that, and if you have more than a passing interest in American cinema or Scorsese, you’ll probably want to see Shutter Island regardless of what any critic tells you. I’d just warn you not to get your expectations too high.

But, though I don’t agree with Florino’s review - I might not agree with him on the relative merits of The Red Shoes, Suspiria or Dante’s Inferno either - I get what he’s saying. You can look at Shutter Island as a construct of noise and visuals, minimizing the“problems” that I found with its involuted plot, its purposefully overheated dialogue and DiCaprio’s unconvincing world weariness. Scorsese is one of the best at using sound and light to evoke emotional response, and, had I seen the movie under different circumstances, in a different frame of mind, with a different set of cinematic experiences, I would have written something completely different about the film.

No one sees the same movie twice. And no one sees the same movie as anyone else. They can’t, because the screen on which any picture is ultimately projected is one in a dark little room at the back of your mind, where the furniture is constantly being rearranged. Writing a review may be the closest a critic can come to admitting someone else to that private screening room, but we’re obviously limited by the levelizing filter of language and our own incomplete knowledge.

That’s not to say that some things aren’t better than other things and that everything is relative and subject to empty valorization or denigration. Most people who make movies (or write movie reviews) aren’t top-notch artists - a lot of them don’t even aspire to do what artists do. A lot of people engage in hack work, and even the best people sometimes produce work that, for whatever reason, doesn’t genuinely sing.

But whatever it is, Shutter Island isn’t hack work, and if Florino was moved to praise it, he’s not wrong to do so. We’re doing English comp here, not math, and while there are somewrong - which is to say, dishonest - answers, so long as you can make a cogent argument for your opinion and say things in an interesting way, you can forward the conversation.

Florino didn’t change my mind about the film, but he caused me to think about it in a slightly different way, to move a little off the wordy, storycentered focus through which I still view movies. They’re not just stories, they’re also moving paintings. Scorsese reminds me more of Titian than of Picasso, and Scorsese’s work can’t be simply parsed. There’s an awful lot of stuff in there to be pulled out and examined, things we can have a conversation about.

And that conversation is what criticism is all about - not the thumbs-up or thumbsdown verdict that any hack can (and will) readily deliver. While Florino is outside the mainstream of critical opinion on this one, there’s no real consensus on Shutter Island among my colleagues - which makes for a more interesting conversation.

I very much like his review. I like it when critics get excited by movies and I wish it happened more often. Florino might (or might not) eventually come to be embarrassed by the depth of his feeling for Shutter Island, but it’s reflective of his state of mind at the time he sat down to write about the movie he’d just seen. It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to prove how smart or clever or morefinely attuned he is to beauty than the rest of us. It doesn’t seem purposefully contrarian. it just feels honest.

It makes me wish I’d seen that movie too.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 02/26/2010

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