How interesting that 2010 saw so many of cinema’s Young Turks offering evidence of greater maturity in their filmmaking (Christopher Nolan in Inception, Darren Aronofsky in Black Swan, David Fincher in The Social Network), and how interesting that two of the medium’s most venerated masters—Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese—decided to go in the opposite direction, turning in glossy larks seemingly engineered for maximum playtime. Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, Scorsese’s Shutter Island; these two films share much of the same DNA. Both are adaptations of popular novels, both elevate their source materials’ beach-read cheesiness to a rococo pulp, and both create dense visual experiences designed to homage the great suspense filmmakers of yore—guys like Sam Fuller, Val Lewton, Fritz Lang, Mario Bava, Michael Powell, and Alfred Hitchcock might turn red with flattery if they’d lived to see either film.
Currently, Metacritic charts a 77% favorability rating for The Ghost Writer and a 63% rating for Shutter Island, and one can attribute that 14% difference to an interesting discrepancy. By and large, critics praised Polanski for his stylistic and genre homages and criticized Scorsese for the same indulgences. Check out The New Yorker’s dueling reviews of The Ghost Writer and Shutter Island for explicit evidence of this condition.
David Denby gives The Ghost Writer an unqualified rave, highlighting Polanski’s nimble cinematic technique as it “offers…the steady pleasures of high intelligence and unmatchable craftsmanship…a stunning over-all design that has been color-coordinated to the point of aesthetic mania.” Denby acknowledges the film’s fluffy genre aspirations, but he finds them appealing, that “there may be nothing formally inventive in this kind of classical technique, but, in the hands of a master, it’s smooth and satisfying, and…it works its old magic.”
Contrast that with Anthony Lane’s more negative Shutter Island report. Lane lauds Scorsese for his mastery of craft, how “the thrill of watching [his protagonists] blunder through a graveyard during a hurricane…or…tiptoe through Ward C, the maximum-security wing, with light and water dripping from on high and misting spookily underfoot, shows a director in such command of his skills that no pathetic fallacy escapes him,” before condemning that same craft as limiting of potential greatness. “No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past,” Lane writes of Shutter Island’s inspirations, “but when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?”
The contrast in opinions stands indicative of the larger critical consensus—Polanski gets away with screwing around. Scorsese doesn’t.
Here’s the thing about critics: despite their support of tricky material, critics like to keep tone simple. It’s fine for a filmmaker to create a way-out tone as long as it stays consistent. Start adding new flavors, and the critics start sharpening their knives.
The Ghost Writer stays consistent tonally. Polanski has created the kind of high-sheen thriller that Hitchcock used to make in his sleep; despite the political and autobiographical allusions, it is all glittering, menacing surfaces. I used to have issues with the actors playing archetypes rather than people or the ludicrous plot contrivances powering the narrative, but I’ve softened on those problems because of how unimportant they are in the tonal scheme of things. The Ghost Writer isn’t about a book so deadly people kill to hide it before they allow its publication or a conspiracy daft enough to be solved with a cursory Google search or a protagonist whose sense of self-preservation is akin to the squirrel that dashes as fast as it can towards a moving car. It’s about desolate, wind-swept beaches that hold fatal secrets. It’s about being alone in a fleabag motel at three in the morning, unsure if the knock on the other side of your door belongs to someone who wants to help you or kill you. It’s about a letter passed from hand to hand by people who will never know how important it is. The Ghost Writer isn’t about people or logic or emotion; it’s about mood, and what a mood it is.
For 105 of its 138 minutes, Shutter Island places the same emphasis on mood, creating a baroque, The Red-Shoes-by-way-of-Shock-Corridor ambience, and then…
Without delving into spoilers, Scorsese infects his film with emotion. He doesn’t just reveal the big twist. In fact, one can argue that Scorsese telegraphs the twist from the beginning as a Brechtian exercise to direct viewer focus onto the more theatrical filmmaking devices and as a means of recontexualizing the film as a stealth character study rather than a trashy thriller. The twist in Shutter Island…incidental. The psychological elements that forged it…now we’re getting somewhere. They introduce a somber, humanistic tone from what was previously established, and I feel that mingling of tones jarred many critics. For one, it runs at right angles from what Scorsese had given us until the last act of his film. We thought we were getting a glib exercise and BAM! We’re in Cassavettes Territory. Furthermore, once he’s established this depth of feeling, Scorsese doesn’t turn his film into a docudrama. Shutter Island is still a Movie-Movie homage—complete with lush, Cinemascope photography and subjective slow-motion shots—we’re now expected to care about the people involved.
Shutter Island gives audiences a lot to process by its conclusion, and I don’t blame critics for experiencing tonal whiplash. I do fault the urge to call a movie flawed because it strives for many things all at once. That’s the trap Shutter Island sets. It lures you with its surface glow, and it’s only after you’ve luxuriated in the waters for some time that you realize how deep they are. This is challenging, idiosyncratic filmmaking disguised as pap, and further proof (as if we needed any) that Martin Scorsese need never worry about competing with his younger peers.
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