Shutter Island (2010)

A twin delight of writing The Penciltonian and having access to Netflix is that I'm able to catch up on some of the big movies everybody else seems to have seen at The Cinema.  Since I'm not immensely sociable, and since movie theatres are unappealing for dozens of reasons, I've managed to miss almost all the blockbusters of the last half-decade, so I had ample choice for 2010's movie.  I left the choice up to Saskia, since she worked in a cinema at the time, and she picked 'Shutter Island', as I said I knew nothing about it, nothing at all.

Apparently complete ignorance is a good starting-point for this film, so if you think you'd like to watch it (and it is very good) I'd skip the rest of my comments, though I intend to say little and spoil less.  I knew only that it was set on an island.

So Leonardo DiCaprio is a detective, ferried into an island asylum for the criminally insane, there to investigate an implausible disappearance.  This much is clear in the first ten minutes, and it's really all I need to talk about.  It's a fine, attention-grabbing set-up for a film, and he's an actor I quite enjoy.  I was wary of the whole 'island of insane criminals' concept, but once Sir Ben Kingsley turns up as a quiet, intense, but generally agreeable psychiatrist we get a decent discussion of medical and surgical responses to the island's prisoners and patients (this being 1954, and the age of needless brain-surgery) and his own preferred method, the talking cure.  The mentally ill prisoners are shown to be irrational, sometimes unpredictable and in some circumstances dangerous, but for once they aren't presented to us as monsters.

I'm rather pleased to have discovered so recent a film about crime and psychiatry, as it's a pair of themes that are often coupled in the movies.  From pictures I've seen this year, 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' (1933) and 'Der Cabinet des Dr Caligari' (1920) both tell of murderous psychiatrists who dwell within their asylums, and 'Häxan' (1922) ends with a familiar discussion of whether institutionalising our eccentrics is really much of a move up from burning them to death.  'The Island of Lost Souls' (1932) also leapt to mind, since it too begins with a hero on a boat to a dangerous island ruled by a doctor, his guards and patients.  Its a pity I didn't make room for Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' (1945), which popularised all the common psychiatrist stereotypes while telling a tale of a murder investigation.  Cinema has taught us to be immensely suspicious of psychiatrists, and this film spends a long while asking us, and DiCaprio's detective, what we should make of Sir Ben Kingsley and his Germanic colleague Max von Sydow.

What we get is engrossing and rather fascinating, and feels much like a cross between 'The Wicker Man' (1973) and 'The Prisoner' (1967).  Indeed, it does the things that 'The Prisoner' did very much better than that series own 2009 remake, and is, as a result, extremely satisfying and much to my tastes.  If I've one complaint it's that the last few minutes of the climax are too laboriously thorough, telling us something we already know to make sure we get the point.

At the end I discovered this was yet another Martin Scorsese film.  These keep creeping up on me during my Penciltonian viewings, so this one goes on the list with 'Taxi Driver' (1976), 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988) and 'Goodfellas' (1990). Only Peter Greenaway and Fritz Lang have lent me so many movies, and I'd be happy to see more by any of 'em.

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GoodFellas (1990)

This is a story about a guy who gets into crime - organised crime and killing people crime - not reluctantly or through necessity, but because he thought that life would be cool, fun and easy.  And it turned out he was entirely right.  It's an appealing story, and a true one.  He and his wife would have gotten away with it for as long as they lived, had they not grown so very careless and full of drugs.

Rob Reed gave me his copy of the film at the same time he passed me 'Taxi Driver' (1976), and since I've also watched 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988), Martin Scorsese joins Peter Jackson, Peter Greenaway and Fritz Lang in the circle of most-watched directors on this blog.  This is probably the longest of the three films, and the one with the most humour and the most violence.  It's a toss-up, though, which of the three is the bloodiest.

Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) borrows a knife from his mother (Catherine Scorsese)

Ray Liotta plays Henry Hill, who throws himself into the criminal lifestyle, and finds that it pays exceedingly well.  Unlike 'The Baader-Meinhof Complex' (2008), there's no suggestion here that the crimes are particularly benign or well-motivated, but it's clearly a better career move than brick-laying.  For the most part he seems a nice guy, but he laughs too long at acts of unprompted brutality - indeed, he seems to laugh almost deliberately at these, not with mirth, but to be seen laughing.  He works his way up from errand boy to crime boss, reluctantly goes on an awful date with a woman called Karen (Lorraine Bracco), who, since she's far more bold and interesting than she first appears, goes on to be his partner in crime and wife.

Like Hugh Griffith in 'Ben-Hur', Joe Pesci got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor here simply by being fantastically entertaining.  His role seems at times like the comic relief, but is really more exciting and disturbing than that.  He's persistent, almost flamboyantly vicious, and enjoyably short, and seems to speak constantly and magnificently.  As you may tell, I found him to be the film's great highlight.  Robert de Niro and Samuel L. Jackson are in there too - indeed, it's a very good cast all-round, made up of people who are rightly famous, or ought to be more so.

It's directed with pace, style and tension, of course, and the script finds some exciting ways to tell the story.  I'm sure I could have gone on for another four paragraphs, had I written this up immediately after watching it, but you got lucky as I left it so long, dear reader.  Most of what I now remember are twists, lines, images.  In short, the things you'd be better off discovering for yourself by watching the film.  I try not to spoil these things for you.

P.S. I'll be back this weekend with 'Persepolis' (2007), and then I'll probably have to watch some more movies, or I will have run out of stuff to tell you about.

P.P.S. This isn't strictly-speaking true.  I could tell you about 'The Last Remake of Beau-Geste' (1977) or 'The Baby of Macon' (1993) or 'Das weiße Band' (2009) or 'Ted' (2012), but we've done those years already, and I'm keen to push on towards the hundred-different-years goal.

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So, yeah.  Here's the bit where I show you how you can legitimately watch the thing.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

This film was exceedingly controversial when it came out in the late eighties.  It's based, not on the gospels, but on a novel about Jesus, and does the two things one can always expect from New Testament fan-fic: Jesus is romantically linked to Mary Magdalene, and he asks Judas to betray him.  And then, of course, there's his last temptation, but I'll get to that.  In spite (or even because of) this portrayal of a remarkably weak, human and troubled Christ, this is an excellent film and worth the watching, both for style and content, and one that I'd recommend with the warning that the crucifixions (of which there are several) are very unpleasant indeed (hence its inclusion in this blog's 'horrible films' tag).

From the off, this Jesus is not the confident and charismatic crowd-winner we're used to.  He's wracked by conflict, as God calls him to fearful duties and Lucifer puts to him, again and again, the idea that he's mistaken, that he's no messiah and should simply live his life.  The crowds simply aren't convinced by his speeches, and familiar sermons meet with derision and doubt, rather than open-eared adoration.  As it becomes clearer to Jesus that he really is the son of God, he's dismayed and terrified, as he knows where it will lead.  This Jesus is the only carpenter who'll make crosses for the Romans, and he's despised for it, by himself, as much as the other Jews.

Judas, comforted by Jesus

Rather than praise everybody involved in the making of the film for their style and quality of their performances, I'll save time and name some names.  Martin Scorsese is directing, Peter Gabriel composing, with Willem Dafoe as the Christ.  His lack of physical beauty and easy charm probably makes him the closest screen Jesus to the one Biblical description of Jesus' looks, which crops up in Isaiah: 'he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him'.  Harvey Keitel is a flame-haired and muscular Judas, the only person Jesus can really rely on.  As usual, it's a fairly white cast for something set in Israel, but unlike most Jesus biopics, the Jews here look and sound Jewish, Jewish-American, to be precise, which works very well.  I feel obliged to mention that there's a single scene cameo by David Bowie as Pontius Pilate, and he's good, quiet, pensive, but is given very little to do here, so my favourite screen Pilate remains Frank Thring in 'Ben-Hur' (1959).

What of the Last Temptation of the title?  It's the whole point of the film, but is constrained to the final fifth of a two-and-a-half hour movie.  I'll be sauntering somewhat into spoiler territory here, but since you may have already seen that screen-cap down there it's already sort-of too late, but this really isn't a film that relies greatly on twists, so I don't think your viewing experience will be diminished.  So, as you may know, Jesus goes out into the desert for forty days to fast and meditate, and while there is thrice tempted by Satan.  It's brilliantly realised in this film, which paraphrases events as well as words, and so makes both dialogue and visuals engaging and surprising.  Satan says that Jesus will see him again, and it's at this point that Jesus takes up the main body of his mission.

Aged Jesus and his guardian angel

As per the Bible, after the Last Supper, Jesus begs God to release him from his fate, to save him from dying on the cross.  Despite this, he's nailed up to die, but just as he's on the cusp of perishing, he cries out, asking why he's been forsaken.  At this point, a young English-accented girl, his guardian angel, tells him God has had mercy and released him from this terrible fate.  He climbs down from the cross, though the crowd still see him there, and he goes on to live a long and mainly happy life.  He marries, has children, grows to old age.  This, though he doesn't see it, is his last temptation.

It's highly likely this film inspired 'Human Nature' that Tennant-era Doctor Who classic: in each, our hero is offered a vision of a normal human life, the delight of love, family, and a good, natural death of old age - and each has to choose whether to live the life they yearn for, that they've certainly earnt, or to die unjustly and save the world.  Eventually Jesus begins to hear people condemn him for failing to be the crucified and resurrected Jesus they're preaching, and who the people need to save them.  For me the film's highlight is a scene in which old Jesus runs into a highly animated Paul of Tarsus, given the film's most enjoyable performance by Harry Dean Stanton, and condemns him pretending that there had ever been a crucifixion, let alone a resurrection.

I suspect the film's ongoing controversy arises largely from the idea (all in the fantasy of this last temptation, and largely, though not wholly, implied rather than shown) that Jesus had sex.  With, y'know, women.  The weakness and doubt shown in this presentation of Jesus is likely another factor, as well as the role of Judas and the notable amount of casual nudity. (My friend Tom Hagley described this as a 'nipple film', venturing that a high percentage of shots contain at least one visible, often Willem Dafoe's).  I don't think these things should count against a very good film about Jesus, which really gets to the core of why the crucifixion was necessary to reconcile man to God, and why God didn't relieve Jesus of this burden even when he begged for another solution.  If you want a modern, well-shot and horribly bloody film about Jesus, his mission and his death, 'The Last Temptation of Christ' is a far more interesting, enjoyable and helpful film than 'The Passion of the Christ' (2004).

Pondering it over the week, I'm tempted to venture that this might even be the best film yet made about Jesus of Nazareth.  Feel quite at liberty to disagree in the comments.  For another film of a novel about Jesus, albeit one in which he hardly features, tune in on Easter Sunday for my comments on my favourite ever film, 'Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ' (1959).

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Taxi Driver (1976)

I mentioned my film-watching antics to my friend Rob Reed, who lectures in film-related things, so seemed likely to suggest films I hadn't seen and wouldn't have thought of.  He knows how ignorant I am of cinema (or rather, he knows which areas of film I've fixated on, and therefore what I've missed), and, when Christmas came, gave me a film wrapped in festive paper.  'Taxi Driver' was that film (or else this paragraph would seem irrelevant, would it not?).  

The only Martin Scorsese-directed films I'd seen at this point were 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988) and 'No Direction Home' (2005), a documentary about Bob Dylan - both of which apparently lay some way outside his usual style.  I had a notion that his films were violent, dark, and full of Italian-Americans shouting at each other (a prospect I've now found hails from his 1990 work 'Goodfellas', which Rob likewise pressed into my hands).

Oh look, some guns.

I suspected that this film would lead to a violent finale, but I wasn't certain even of this.  For the first half-hour, this could just turn into an idiosyncratic romantic comedy, except that our taxi-driving protagonist is just a tad too intense, too socially awkward, and then increasingly so.  For some reason, it hadn't to me occurred at all that the plot would actually be about a man driving a taxi around, but that's how it went.

From the off this was far more attractive than the other 70s films I've looked at so far.  Richer, more menacing, with the taxi prowling, leonine.  We see Robert de Niro thinking, as he drives his taxi, but we don't know what about.  Even in his narration, he gives few clues.  Only the music is overtly menacing - and it's Bernard Hermann composing, so it could hardly be otherwise.

I'll jump past the main body of the film, as I've no interest in reciting synopses in this blog.  In what I took to be the final ten minutes, the film seems to slip into another genre - the practiced violence, the spree I'd spent the last hour preparing for, is far, far dirtier, less clean and easy than I'd expected.  The colours fade and the world slips into slower and slower motion until time seems to stop to show us the whole mess.  Then, when I most expected the film to end, it doesn't.  There are five or ten more minutes, which serve to make the scenario even more unsettling, the idea that the events in this film could happen anywhere, to anyone, for no particular reason.

Bang!

I sometimes wonder what it's like to live in America, where films such as this are set, not in some bigger, cooler, distant and more important nation, but in your homeland.  The States always seem much grander that Britain, even when that just means grimmer and more horrible - and the accents, to one who never visited, mark New York out as a genre rather than a region.

Anyway, I feel I've been writing too many words about some films lately, so, while I could go on rather longer, I'll curtail this here.  Less is more, as they say.

P.S. Since the last update was from the 60s and this was from the 70s, you can expect an 80s film on Thursday, a 90s one on Sunday, and so on, until I grow bored and frustrated with the pattern.  It might prompt me to finally watch something from the 1950s, a decade untouched by the last forty-four films I've watched over the past four months.

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The film, if you yearn for it.