I've never cared for movies about the mob -- not even the "Godfather" films -- because I don't like spending time with ignorant thugs. Likewise, I yawn with frustration -- ditch the manners, tell the truth -- at the Prissy Brit school of social dishonesty.
But Scorsese showed me the heart and soul of both groups, the honesty behind the facade, from city streets where gangsters were heroes to turn-of-the-century Manhattan parlors where refined blue bloods revealed themselves.
The point is this: Whether he is getting inside the head of a psychopath (Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver" and "The King of Comedy") or inside another world ("Gangs of New York"), Scorsese engages truth as deeply as perhaps any other director.
That's why his more mainstream efforts -- a cop movie, a thriller -- are often less memorable, as Scorsese reaches for deeper meaning in plots that don't demand it. Such was the case with "The Departed," a Best Picture winner (for past oversights, I guess), and with "Shutter Island," a psychological thriller that holds you but does not move you.
Scorsese favorite Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. marshal in 1954 investigating an escape from a hospital for the criminally insane on a spooky Boston Harbor island. Things are eerie and gothic from the start, as questions go unanswered and doctors (Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow) throw up well-mannered walls at every turn.
Is Teddy, carrying demons of his own in his wife's tragic death and his experiences liberating Dachau in the war, caught up in a conspiracy of secrecy that will make him question his own sanity? That question propels you. A deeper truth does not. Three-and-a-half Hearts.
THE BETTER HALF -- My first inkling there might be some problems with "Shutter Island" was when the studio moved its release date from the coveted November holiday period to the dead zone of February, when pictures are all but forgotten by next year's Oscar time.
Perhaps they were trying to spare famed director Martin Scorsese some embarassment, because "Shutter Island," his first film since the Oscar-winning "The Departed," will not be getting many accolades.
In a word, the mental asylum mystery is a long, jumbled, artsy mess, from its overbearing, foreboding score of impending doom to Scorsese's strange homage to Hitchcock. There's a "Vertigo" staircase scene, a "North by Northwest" cliff-hanging scene, to name a few that come off almost as spoofs rather than film noir-ish.
Federal marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have come by ferry to the isolated Shutter Island, where 66 patients are housed in a prison hospital for the criminally insane.
They're there to investigate the escape of child murderer Rachel Soldano, who has somehow gone missing without a trace. Teddy also wants to secretly investigate his suspicions that patients are being experimented on by the hospital's head doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow).
But first he'll have to battle a hurricane that's pounding the island and his own migraines and haunting flashbacks of World War II and his personal tragedies that seem to be overtaking him.
To the movie's credit, it does finally tie together in the end, and the last third is pretty engaging. It's just the deep sighing and shuddering over the overblown scenes that it takes to get there that wears you out. Two-and-a-half Hearts.
Until next time, keep walking down the aisle ... Married to the Movies.
