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Saw this last week, and liked it. I wanted to love it, but I liked it.
Clever idea, but an idea that we’d seen before. The Manchurian Candidate is too far away for a real comparison, but its shadow did fall across this one.
Leonardo was Ok, but I was more interested in seeing just how beaten up he looked than empathising with his struggle.
It was an entertaining struggle, don’t get me wrong. The story twisted and turned, and mostly convinced, but there were gaps in sense that wounded, and a stab of exposition near the end that murdered.
Thematically it just felt so far removed from any of my concerns today that it didn’t move me at all. It’s not often that you can watch the fallout from the murder of three children and not be moved, but this movie managed it.
Dennis Lehane wrote the novel, and the movie felt like the movie of a novel. So rich, and oblique, and laden with concepts and conceits and themes and motifs and literary STUFF it never quite took flight as a movie.
Mystic River, also originally a novel by Dennis Lehane, worked far better, in my humble opinion. I’ll go back and back to Mystic River, because it moves me more every time I see it. I think Shutter Island will get left on the shelf.
I don’t know what happened to Lehane here, (who knows what goes on between draft 1 and draft 99) but perhaps Scorsese should have begged, (or allowed, whatever) Lehane to join in for the ride on the screenplay on this one like Eastwood did on that one.
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