Making important, sometimes even unforgettable, movies is something for which Martin Scorsese seems potty trained. Shutter Island is not one of them. Dense, ridiculously over-plotted and painfully over-long, this gruesome thriller set in a fogbound insane asylum is incomprehensible and fatally flawed, but having said all of that, I will also say this: it never seems anything less than the work of a skillful film buff. Mr. Scorsese may be a smart aleck, but he’s a professional smart aleck.
Teaming with frequent collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed) and writer Dennis Lehane (Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River), the director returns to the Boston of both films to try his hand at the hair-raising thriller genre. The year is 1954, at the height of the Red-baiting Communist terror of the Cold War (a time nobody cares about anymore, although important to the plot). Out of the fog, a ferry boat materializes, carrying two federal marshals named Teddy (a seasick DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) on their way to the remote Shutter Island off the Massachusetts coast to find a dangerous female patient who has escaped from Ashcliffe, an asylum for the criminally insane. Almost immediately, they are confronted by Gothic horrors inspired by Titicut Follies and plunged into a Thorazine nightmare that fishes for logic with a red herring on the end of every hook. From the evil staff of resident doctors led by Ben Kingsley and especially Max von Sydow, as a Nazi who may have performed medical experiments at Dachau, to the escaped psychopath who murdered her three children (Emily Mortimer), the two cops are up to their Humphrey Bogart hats in paralyzing terror. It’s 11 miles to the nearest land, and the water surrounding the island is sub-zero. Since the terrain is overgrown with poison ivy and thorns, escape on foot is impossible and the woman they’re tracking down was wearing no shoes. Meanwhile, Mr. DiCaprio seems none too stable himself. Migraine headaches, flashbacks to Hitler, concentration camps, and his dead wife (Michelle Williams) who burned to death in a fire but keeps returning in dreams wandering through rooms of falling ashes. That kind of thing. Thickening the gumbo, Mr. Scorsese adds more patients—the firebug who killed her, a female psychiatrist hiding in a cave, and various frightened prisoners chained to their cells in the violent ward who claim the hospital (financed by the House of Un-American Activities Committee) is doing to the patients on Shutter Island what the Nazis did at Dachau. Maybe I missed something in political science, but why would the Communists team up with the Fascists just to send Lillian Hellman to jail? While the movie becomes more preposterous by the micro-minute, Mr. DiCaprio is confronted with the realization that he can’t trust anybody, and one (or both) of the cops is an imposter. Cue the rainstorm, with howling, gale-force winds and thrashing, blinding lightning—and you wonder how Karloff and Lugosi stayed out of this one.
Mr. Scorsese cuts between the down-to-earth criminal investigation and the surrealism of the psychological nightmares with so much creepy detail that you can no longer separate fantasy from reality. The storm builds to a hurricane right out of a Dorothy Lamour movie, and you wait with anxiety to enter the dreaded lighthouse, where the doctors perform pre-frontal lobotomies on stubborn patients by driving icepicks through their brains, and Mr. DiCaprio is the next victim. From here, Shutter Island is less like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and more like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. How could this many talented people get so utterly, confoundingly messed up? How could a director considered such an icon make so much money and demonstrate so little control? He knows where to put the camera and what to do with actors in numbingly worthless roles (what are Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson doing here?) And I really admire him for the work he’s done to preserve classic films and teach unschooled directors what simple, straight-ahead narrative filmmaking is all about. But Marty-love has created a disturbing dark side. Now he’s blended the elements he loved in film noirs and horror genres with mainstream moviemaking, to the detriment of movies. It’s a sorry use of his power. The result may appeal to vacant-eyed Scorsese fans too arrogant or embarrassed to admit they don’t have a clue what’s going on here. He spearheaded this mess and when he lost his compass, it started to look like he was too trapped financially to pull the plug. It looks like a committee made it up every day as they went along; when it still didn’t work in time for Christmas, 2009, he went back into the editing lab and screwed it up some more. Too bad. Before it completely self-destructs, Shutter Island keeps you riveted.
I don’t mind telling you this is usually my kind of movie. If only it made sense. The first hour is as savagely disturbing as any horror movie ever seen, but at more than 2 and ½ hours length, the ice cubes Shutter Island sends through the bloodstream begin to defrost. In the end, you feel lost and doomed, and you will never know why. Either Mr. DiCaprio is the victim of an elaborate conspiracy theory plot, or he’s been insane for years already. The theme is insanity, and by the time this ordeal ends, you get the feeling it’s catching.
The inmates are running a different kind of asylum in Happy Tears, a vulgar, happy-as-cancer aberration that takes the dysfunctional family idea to a new low. Whimsical, yes. Happy, never.
Two estranged sisters with nothing in common are forced to return to their seedy family home in Pittsburgh to deal with their father, who is suffering from advanced stages of Binswanger’s, a rare neurological disorder from which there is no cure. Jayne (Parker Posey) is an incompetent neurotic who can’t face reality on any level, and from her first scene, in which she spends thousands of dollars on a pair of knee-high stiletto-heel leather boots from a shoe salesman who turns into a buzzard, there is some indication that Binswanger’s might be inherited. Her focused, take-charge older sister Laura (Demi Moore) grapples with the problems of dealing with three kids and a gay husband while traveling around the country testing the quality of the local water supply. Both sisters once worked as strippers.
Joe, the senile father (played with maximum obscenity by a grotesque Rip Torn) is an incontinent old retired blues singer who sits half-naked at the kitchen table throwing up on himself. He is also being nursed (and ripped off) by a floozy named Shelly (Ellen Barkin), a sexy crack head and check forger who wants her own piece of the hidden fortune the old geezer is rumored to have buried on the property. While they pretend to deal with real problems (selling the house, disposing of the contents in a yard sale, sending the old man to a nursing home) everyone gets waylaid by a script that is up to its imploding cerebellum in a dementia of its own. Laura spends her time dragging Joe from the table to clean up his very visible soiled diapers. Jayne is married to Jackson (Christian Camargo), a rich California art dealer and would-be painter who slashes his wrists and paints canvases with his own blood. No wonder she talks to her sex organs and sees people disappear through patterns in the carpet. Shelly wears a stethoscope around her neck and eats with her bare hands while Joe tells his daughters, “She’s had two kids, but she’s still real tight.” For family bonding, they pile up in bed and watch The Mummy together. Later, the family photos turn into Boris Karloff.
Happy Tears is written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, a memorable actor (Streamers, The Lords of Discipline) and an original thinker with a kinky sense of humor who has unfortunately developed no distinctive skills as a writer or director of substance. (His first feature, Teeth, was about a woman with teeth in her vagina.) He is also the son of renowned artist Roy Lichtenstein, and his mother did suffer from dementia, but he insists the film is not autobiographical and claims he did not base the character of Jackson on himself. This is probably true, since nothing in the film smacks of reality. Aside from Demi Moore’s grounded portrait of the world-weary Laura, nothing rings true. Everyone says and does freaky things, but nobody ever comes to life. Even the occasional attempt to focus leads to irrelevant gimmicks and distracting dream sequences: Shelly drinking Joe’s blood like a vampire, Jackson in a strait-jacket, bouncing off the walls of a padded cell. During a discussion about long-term nursing, while the doctor is explaining Joe’s dementia, Jayne hears Hawaiian hula music. After awhile, you stop scratching your head and start checking your watch. There’s a fine line between lovable eccentrics and certifiable lunatics. The twisted sisters in Happy Tears are not much fun as either.