22nd
Don’t Call It a Comeback
Aside from sharing a release date, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island bear a remarkable resemblance to one another. Paranoid thrillers adapted from popular books, both films open on shots from afar of a boat cutting through (Polanski’s) night and (Scorsese’s) fog (not to be confused with Night and Fog, though that film should be remembered during Shutter Island especially).
Polanski’s composition - the camera sitting on the waiting dock, framing the boat between two pillars as it slowly cuts through the dark waters and lightless night - and the length of the shot recall his great works. He sets mood, pace, and point of view with a strong image that also connotes his larger themes. Scorsese’s grey fog (pictured above) hangs menacingly until finally the boat carrying our protagonist begins to cut its way through. The dreamlike image (and the following cut to DiCaprio vomiting in the Hostel-like bathroom aboard the vessel) again sets mood, but the haze also visualizes the subjective, placing us in the mindset of DiCaprio’s Teddy before placing us with him, obscuring the truth and the horrors within.
Both films also have climactic shots of papers floating through the air, in both instances documents of truth sent flying to obfuscate what we have learned. The wind-blown papers create yet another haze of white blocking the audience’s view of the truth.
Polanski and Scorsese both use these genre pieces as lenses to play with point of view and knowledge, how we construct and determine both, how hard it is to change either. If the creation of the medium of film allowed us the audience to see - wars, faraway lands, each other - it also allowed others to obscure our vision. Polanski has toyed with this idea from his first film, Knife in the Water, and it continues with his delightful trademark wit in The Ghost Writer. The more Polanski’s protagonists see, the more they are seen by others. The search for truth always leads to paranoia, usually of the self-destructive variety.
A devoted cinephile, Scorsese toys with the conventions and definitions of the film lexicon, constantly pumping in adrenaline and a manic verve. Shutter Island sits apart from his gangster genre work though. Gone are the Rolling Stones, replaced with the hard (and incredible) menace of Robbie Robertson’s bass-heavy score. The overblown flashes of ’30s era bulbs are replaced by the flashes of DiCaprio’s migraines, the past searing his haggard face and disturbing his sleep. The harsh cutting style only further drives us into the island’s fractured psyche.
The fractured psyche originates, in some ways, from wars (both II and Cold). Strangely, Shutter Island is Scorsese’s Holocaust picture, an examination of the extreme depravities man can enact upon one another. If man can commit atrocities so extreme as to attempt the extermination of an entire race, what does killing one’s children or wife really matter? What guilt is too much to bear?
Neither film may crack the top echelon of either directors’ oeuvres, but both are high-water marks for the past decade (or two?). The Ghost Writer and Shutter Island are fun and play great in a packed house. Two directors (one returning to the genre of his heyday, the other playing in a new sandbox) expertly flex their muscles, almost nonchalantly succeeding where so many others would have made limp and staid “entertainments.”
But there’s darkness lingering under both, perhaps best voiced in the last line of Shutter Island: “Would you rather die a good man, or live a monster?”
