Entrevista a Leonardo DiCaprio (Clarín)

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Crítica de "La isla siniestra/Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (Clarín)

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"Shutter Island/La isla siniestra": Entrevista a Martin Scorsese (Clarín)

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Brutal Attraction: The Making of Raging Bull (Vanity Fair)

‘It was Bob’s film,” says Irwin Winkler, the producer of Raging Bull. By which he means that it was Robert De Niro’s driving passion, long before it became Martin Scorsese’s common-consent greatest work. At the time—the late 70s—no one could understand what the actor saw in the life story of Jake La Motta, the brutal, yet curiously masochistic, middleweight boxing champion from 1949 to 1951, who may have been bull-like in the ring but was often more raving than raging when he was just trying to live his life.

I’m not certain that De Niro himself could, at the time, have fully explained his obsession with what was nominally a biopic and nominally a boxing picture, but was not quite either one. It had something to do, he now thinks, with “the primal emotions” the film trafficked in. He felt that if an essentially middle-class movie audience could be induced to empathize with these marginal, emotionally ignorant, and screechingly inarticulate people—La Motta, his wife, and his brother—it would be a good, discomfiting, perhaps even instructive experience.

Martin Scorsese answers the Proust Questionnaire.

He also believed, more certainly, that the only man who could possibly make the movie was his closest friend, Marty Scorsese. This, in turn, means that, when we’re talking about how Raging Bull came into being, the drama is not centered on its sets or in its editing rooms—that part was relatively easy. The real story took place in offices, restaurants—even in a hospital room and on a balmy Caribbean island. Essentially, it was all about Mobilizing Marty. To Thelma Schoonmaker, the film’s editor, the project was “a great gift of friendship” on De Niro’s part. But for the longest time it seemed anything but that to the director, who was then passing through what was surely the greatest crisis of his professional life, wondering whether he would make another film of any sort, let alone one as challenging, as enigmatic, to him as Raging Bull.

At this point, in 1978, Scorsese and De Niro were, in the former’s words, “like brothers.” As adolescents they had had a nodding acquaintance when they were members of rival (but peaceable) Lower East Side gangs. As adults they had made Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York together. By now, they were capable of finishing each other’s sentences, though sometimes there were no sentences to finish; they could communicate with nods, gestures, and fleeting facial expressions.

They were not, however, communicating very well over the proposed film’s source material, Raging Bull: My Story, an autobiography La Motta had cobbled together with the help of writer Joseph Carter and boyhood friend Peter Savage. It was not much of a book, even by the primitive standards of sports bios, circa 1970. But Savage was also an acquaintance of De Niro’s and had sent him a copy, and the actor somehow perceived subtexts—maybe even a sort of rough sublimity—in it. At some point De Niro resolved to meet La Motta and sought him out at a strip club on New York’s Seventh Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets. “He was in charge of security there,” De Niro says, then pauses and laughs: “Well, really, he was the head bouncer.” The actor’s first impression was of an old fighter “doing battle with his weight”—a battle that De Niro would himself famously fight when he had to gain some 60 pounds to do the film’s later sequences (and then lose them after they were finished). By this time La Motta was truly a fringe figure. His last fight had been in 1954; he nominally stayed in the public eye doing stand-up routines in clubs as well as a one-man show reciting Shakespeare, among other literary sources, for audiences who came for the spectacle of seeing a roughneck make a fool of himself.

Scorsese just couldn’t understand De Niro’s enthusiasm for this story. Mardik Martin, who was a friend of Scorsese’s from N.Y.U.’s film school and co-author of the Mean Streets screenplay, thinks that, at this point, Scorsese had done no more than riffle through the book. Born in 1942, the director had been a little kid (and already a committed movie geek) when La Motta was at the top of his game. “I didn’t know anything about boxing,” Scorsese says. “It was always one angle on TV or in the movie theaters, where they’d show the fights on the weekend. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. It was sports, which took me out of the picture.” Still, he agreed to help develop the project with De Niro, though without much passion or focus.

Factors aside from an allergy to sports contributed to Scorsese’s inattention. There was, to begin with, the New York, New York problem. Released in 1977, it was a strange hybrid of a movie, partly a lavish tribute to the big-scale MGM musicals of the 1940s and 50s, partly an improvisatory love story tracking the combative relationship between a saxophone player/band leader (De Niro) and his songstress (Liza Minnelli). Its mixture of styles and intent reflected Scorsese’s own mixed motives. Some days he wanted to be an old-fashioned Hollywood genre director; some days he wanted to be an auteur on the more modern European model. What this picture taught him was that you couldn’t be both at the same time. It was scorned by critics and audiences alike. Worse, there was in its reception an implication that Scorsese, until then generally considered the most gifted director of his generation by the cinematic cognoscenti, had received a deserved comeuppance—an opinion fueled to a degree by gossip about heavy drug use and messy emotional dramas on the set.

If anything unambiguously good came out of New York, New York, it was the relationship Scorsese forged with Irwin Winkler, who proved to be a remarkably patient and supportive producer, even though he had his own unexpressed doubts about what had been a rather hubristic enterprise. At the time Raging Bull was first being discussed, his company, Chartoff-Winkler, was coming off Rocky, a mighty, Oscar-winning—and surprise—hit. United Artists was pressing for a sequel, so, as Winkler puts it, “we had some heat with them.” He thought that if Chartoff-Winkler could come up with a script for Raging Bull while playing hard to get regarding Rocky II they could force the studio to do both boxing films. Martin, by that time, was working for Chartoff-Winkler as a story editor and consultant, and the company assigned him to write a screenplay based on the La Motta book.

Scorsese paid scant attention to his efforts. Drained and exhausted by New York, New York, he had immediately taken on The Last Waltz, a complicated concert film and music documentary about the breakup of the rock group the Band, which further depleted his strength. It’s within this context that, instead of taking the 1978 Labor Day weekend off, he decided to attend the Telluride Film Festival, high in the Colorado Rockies.

The air is thin in Telluride; it is not an ideal locale for a lifelong asthmatic—especially a physically and mentally exhausted one. Scorsese more or less collapsed there, and immediately on his return to New York he collapsed again and was taken to a hospital, bleeding from every orifice. His condition was life-threatening; his girlfriend at the time (eventually his wife), Isabella Rossellini, had to leave the country for work and later told Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls—a history of Hollywood in the 70s—that she did not expect ever to see Scorsese alive again. The doctors told him that he had no platelets in his blood, the result of an interaction between his asthma medicines, other prescription drugs, and the cocaine that he then regularly abused. They told him that he was in imminent danger of a brain hemorrhage. They pumped him full of cortisone and ordered total bed rest.

In time, he began to recover, at which point De Niro visited him in the hospital. Like La Motta, Scorsese had touched bottom, and the actor judged his friend was ready to hear yet another pitch for Raging Bull. He was right. “I couldn’t understand Bob’s obsession with it, until, finally, I went through that rough period of my own,” Scorsese recalls. “I came out the other side and woke up one day alive … still breathing.” Says De Niro, “Mostly I told him to do it or not do it, that we had to get real. That was the ‘Come to Jesus’ moment.” And De Niro was not going to take no for an answer. He says that if Scorsese had rejected this new overture “I’d have found some other way to get him to do it.”

Fighting as if He Didn’t Deserve to Live

At this stage, no one envisioned the film’s unique look, tone, or structure. Raging Bull would turn out to be—as its great cinematographer, Michael Chapman, calls it—an opera, in the verismo tradition of Cavalleria Rusticana (portions of which can be heard on the soundtrack) and Pagliacci. “The boxing sequences would be the arias,” Chapman says, contrasting with the very simply shot family sequences, which reveal the La Mottas to be “Italian peasant people who just happened to have been moved to the Bronx.” Probably De Niro saw the redemptive elements in La Motta’s story, but he was thinking largely in terms of its powerful melodramatic possibilities. These people are, of course, uneducated, but they are not stupid. It is just that they have no governors on their emotions, so they scream and hit a lot as they express those primal emotions. More important, they have no capacity to think ahead, to imagine the consequences of their acts.

De Niro had played such a character for Scorsese before—his Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, bopping cheerfully, anarchically, to his doom. Scorsese, indeed, goes as far as to say that Mean Streets and Raging Bull are “really the same movie.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration, and probably not something that consciously occurred to De Niro at the time. He was thinking about Jake’s masochism, for example—his capacity to take brutal beatings without ever being knocked down and then somehow rally and K.O. an opponent who was ahead of him on points. Scorsese likes to quote the inscription on a folk-art painting he was once given: “Jake La Motta fought as if he didn’t deserve to live.” More significantly, there was his lunatic jealousy about his wife, Vickie, which drove him to beating her and his brother, Joey, who he imagined were having an affair. These were scarcely novel emotions in our dramas; what was novel was the screaming pitch—and the physical violence—with which De Niro imagined their being expressed.

By the time of De Niro’s hospital meeting with Scorsese, Mardik Martin had written at least one draft of the screenplay, with very little input from Scorsese. Everyone recalls it as quite conventionally chronological: boyhood, adolescence, triumphant and then defeated young manhood, and finally some sort of almost inarticulate redemption. There was good stuff here—La Motta had been put in the ring by his father when he was a kid, with the money he picked up in these unsanctioned bouts helping to pay the family’s rent—but somehow it didn’t sing. And besides, Scorsese had a distracting obsession of his own: The Last Temptation of Christ, which he had wanted to make since Barbara Hershey had pressed the novel on him when they were shooting Boxcar Bertha for Roger Corman in 1972; he thought it was time to make another push for this unlikely project (which he would end up making nearly a decade later).

Even so, Scorsese found himself intermittently drawn to Raging Bull. Michael Chapman points out that in the 1940s and early 1950s boxing was much more central to popular culture than it now is, that the leading fighters were major celebrities that the young Scorsese would have been aware of. That would have been especially true of La Motta, whose six fights with Sugar Ray Robinson—he won only one of them—form one of the legendary sporting story lines of the era. The young Scorsese must have had some awareness of what La Motta meant to people of his class—especially the Italian portion of it.

Then, too, there were obvious Marty Moments in the screenplay. Martin recalls, for example, describing one of the boxing sequences to Scorsese. He knew of the director’s boyhood love of Biblical epics, so he said, “Think of them as gladiators, fighting in an arena packed with people. Then think of them exchanging blows, and the sweat and the blood flying all over the place, onto their tuxedos, their mink coats.” Martin adds, “That got him excited.” Scorsese also found himself thinking about his grandparents—immigrants who had never really adapted to their adopted country’s customs. “All they could do was have some dignity and respect within the neighborhood,” he says. “They were just lucky to get where they were.” In their mute endurance he saw an analogy to La Motta’s noisier misery. Weren’t the feelings he was expressing—about the nature of manhood, and womanhood, about honor and the obligations to bloodlines—as primitive as theirs but much more visibly expressed?

Martin tried a draft that melded Jake’s story with anecdotes drawn from Scorsese’s family history and his experiences growing up in Little Italy. This draft displeased De Niro and it was discarded. So was Martin—somewhat to his relief since, after three drafts, he felt he was written out on this project. Scorsese and De Niro then met with the writer and director Paul Schrader at Musso & Frank Grill, on Hollywood Boulevard. The occasion was not entirely relaxed. Schrader had written Taxi Driver, but after it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes the film became, as Scorsese puts it, “a Scorsese–De Niro picture, you know. These things get a little touchy at times.” More important, Schrader’s career as a writer-director was flourishing. He had just done Blue Collar and Hardcore and was about to start American Gigolo. He was a very busy guy, but he agreed to give the director and the actor six weeks and not a minute more. And he delivered just what they needed: “He started the picture right in the middle,” throwing out the backstory, Scorsese says. And he started it on a perfect note, with La Motta yelling at an earlier wife for her failure to cook a steak to his exact specifications. In Schrader’s draft she was pregnant and La Motta began beating and kicking her. The violence of that scene was scaled back later—it was too raw a way to begin any movie, and the scene, in the finished film, plays almost comically over the top. But its most important element remains: an unseen neighbor repeatedly shouting “You animals” at them.

Remember that epithet. This may be the only movie the theme of which—La Motta’s unacknowledged struggle for some sort of human redemption—is adumbrated by an offscreen voice. But if Schrader had saved the show, he had not perfected it. “It was a cold script,” says Irwin Winkler. Scorsese and De Niro met with Schrader at least two more times in New York, where he gave them a lot of useful advice—the best of which was to go forward on their own.

Not a Wanker

De Niro suggested a period of total isolation and immersion—no phones, no distractions of any kind. They chose the La Samanna resort, on St. Martin, in the Caribbean—a complex of separate villas. They shared one of them and installed a young assistant in another nearby. She was Gloria Norris, a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate who had worked with Scorsese’s pal Brian De Palma on his early picture Home Movies. Better still, her grandfather had been a fight promoter in New England, so she was no stranger to the boxing world. She brought “tons” of books along to help them with research. She remembers De Niro rising early to run along the beach. She remembers him and Scorsese talking out the script scene by scene in the mornings. She remembers Scorsese writing up the new material on yellow legal pads in the afternoons. She remembers “his handwriting was bad, so he’d have to read some of it out to me. It was full of profanity, and he’d get embarrassed saying those words to me.”

After that, Norris would retreat to her typewriter, and De Niro and Scorsese would sometimes head out in their Jeep to dinner in one of the several extremely good restaurants on the island. “It was total concentration,” Scorsese recalls. “Everything was done at that little table with that silly cabana umbrella and we’re looking out at the ocean.” “Everything” was three complete passes through the script over a period of several weeks.

One important thing they accomplished was to combine two characters—La Motta’s brother, Joey, and a close friend, Pete Savage. The latter finally disappeared entirely from the script. Another much-wrestled-with aspect was the emotional climax. This occurs when La Motta, retired from the ring and owning a nightclub in Miami, is arrested on a morals rap, accused of providing under-age girls for his customers, and ultimately loses everything: his money, his club, his wife. Tossed into jail—his struggle with his guards is as physically intense as anything that takes place in the boxing sequences—he finally reaches the low point of his life. Completely isolated, with no place to turn, no inner resources to summon, he begins to masturbate—in Schrader’s script, that is.

Scorsese thought that was “interesting.” De Niro was more dubious. He just couldn’t think of La Motta as a wanker. But his masochism—that was another matter. The actor had shown an alternative idea to Scorsese once before in New York: getting up and banging his head and his fists against the wall, a brutal act of self-punishment. But the director had been insufficiently focused. Now, on St. Martin, De Niro brought up the idea again. And demonstrated it again. This was another kind of self-abuse, full of a sort of coiled anguish that would really hurt De Niro when, eventually, they shot the sequence. “When I looked at it there [in St. Martin], I saw the scene,” says Scorsese. “I saw the shot—what you see in the film. A number of times I wished I had a camera. I would’ve shot it immediately.”

There are a lot of words in Raging Bull, but there are only four that really count—“I’m not an animal”—muttered in that jail cell in a tone so choked that you can barely hear them. Until that moment, Jake is, as the title implies, just an animal, without any real consciousness, any sense of morality or mortality. Now, in some primitive way, he achieves that knowledge. It’s not a blinding revelation; sainthood is not suddenly on offer for him. But he is, as Scorsese says, “more accepting of himself. He’s more gentle to himself and to the people around him.”

That is to say, he’s more of a Catholic figure. Almost everyone knows that as an adolescent Scorsese briefly aspired to the priesthood and that his adult life has been marked by spiritual questioning, spiritual longing. De Niro came from a much more secular background, but like Scorsese he was an Italian-American formed by the same, well, yes, mean streets; he too knew something about the longing for grace by people who had no words to express that longing. Scorsese says, “It’s the old line from The Diary of a Country Priest,” the Georges Bernanos novel about a clergyman who utterly fails to redeem his greedy, ungodly parish yet dies absolved: “God is not a torturer. He wants us to be merciful with ourselves. And Jake kind of gets there.”

But inexplicably so. Looking back on the film’s writing process, we can see that the entire effort was to strip this story down to its primal elements, to reveal states of being, not states of mind. The controlling idea was never to step back and explain anyone’s behavior; it was to plunge the audience into it, to make us feel, viscerally, every blow Jake La Motta delivered or absorbed in the ring and outside of it. The 40s and 50s, for example, were a period when Hollywood discovered Freud. Picture after picture, as Scorsese puts it, “explained that this guy did this because of that. But you can’t explain any human being with one Freudian term. I said, ‘Let’s take all that out. I don’t want to do any of that.’”

Another significant change in the script was suggested by Michael Powell, the great English director (The Red Shoes, Peeping Tom), whom Scorsese had adopted as a sort of consigliere. At the end of the film we find La Motta in his dressing room, running lines as he prepares to go onstage for his one-man show, An Evening with Jake La Motta. These included some Shakespearean passages, which he had actually done in his act—Bronx accent and all. All wrong, said Powell. Reality be damned, it’s going to sound false on the screen. De Niro proposed the “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront, which Scorsese immediately bought: “That was our iconography, not the Globe Theatre.” And it’s an oddly touching monologue coming from La Motta, who had been more than a contender and was now something less than one.

You Can Go Home Again

The less Raging Bull explained, the more Scorsese was drawn to it. He returned from St. Martin completely committed to the project. Moreover, he derived two bonuses from his island idyll. One was a full return to physical well-being. The weeks on St. Martin, he says, were “sort of like a spa, like 81D2.” More important, the film began a process of reconciliation with his own past, from which he had become estranged during his years of Hollywood strivings. “Raging Bull meant something new to me. I said, ‘Wait a minute—I can’t deny who I am or where I came from.’ And so I embraced my parents again. They became part of my life in the films. My father’s in Raging Bull. My mother started acting in a lot of the films. They became people who were on the set to help me remember who I am and where I came from. I was harboring a lot of anger and I think it just explodes in Raging Bull.”

But not as a white and blinding fireball. It’s typical of very potent movies that we tend to remember their most explosive scenes—in this case the vivid carnage in the ring, the cringe-inducing scenes of domestic violence. They often blot out sequences of a different, indeed contradictory nature. I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but if you re-encounter Raging Bull today, after a long absence, you will find it far more tender than you remember—even, at times, rather sweet-spirited. The picture would not work if it did not contain expressions of the authentic yearning Jake and Vickie felt for each other in their courtship and in the early days of their marriage. For instance, the scene where he first seduces her is almost silent—and faintly comic, too, as he pours cold water down his pants to cool his ardor. But it motivates the rest of their story.

Gloria Norris agrees with that reading. She stayed with the picture after St. Martin, continuing her research, and as production proceeded she also saw a more compassionate tone seeping into the film. Some of this doubtless derived from the conciliatory mood that overtook Scorsese. Some of it arose from his contentment with the people he had gathered to make it. Like the writers (credited and uncredited), most of the cast and crew had worked with him before, and the outlanders recruited to the film partook of their mood. This was, more so than on most movies, a band of brothers functioning efficiently and harmoniously—with a couple of sweet sisters added to the group: the actress Cathy Moriarty and the editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

Of the newcomers, Moriarty and Joe Pesci are the most visible. The latter was known to Scorsese from a comedy act he had with Frank Vincent (who also appears in Raging Bull), in which the pair parodied comedy teams, but it was his appearance in a short film that Scorsese had screened that won him the job. He had the right spirit for Joey—loyal, excitable, trying to discipline his ever wayward brother. Pesci was also instrumental in bringing Moriarty to the film. He and Vincent had first seen her in a photo from a disco beauty contest in Mount Vernon, New York, and Cis Corman, who was the casting director for the film, also became a supporter. In due course a screen test was arranged at a small New York studio. Irwin Winkler was among those present, and when Moriarty did her scene, he says, “we just looked at each other. We didn’t even print the takes.” They simply agreed, on the spot, that the part was hers. As with De Niro and Pesci, she achieved a rare quality—a curious sort of guilelessness, something that narrows the distance between “performance” and “reality” to paper-thin dimensions.

Achieving that quality in Raging Bull’s visual presentation required considerably more artifice. The most basic (and radical) choice Scorsese made was to shoot in black and white. Michael Chapman approved: “In those days boxing was always in black and white—on television, in Life magazine.”

Scorsese had also studied all the classic boxing pictures, and was troubled by the fact that for the most part the camera was stationed outside the ring. The one exception he noticed was Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul, of 1947. Rossen had sometimes placed his cameraman, James Wong Howe, on roller skates to achieve an unprecedented (and so far unduplicated) intimacy with his boxers. Scorsese wanted to get that effect, sans roller skates, which meant, in the end, placing the camera on a dolly. Normally the floors on which dollies roll are concrete or wood. But a boxing ring is much softer—in order to cushion knockdowns. “Imagine pushing dollies on that surface,” says Chapman. “Those dolly grips really earned their money.” So, too, did the camera operators, for Scorsese wanted to change the speed at which the film was running through the camera without cutting. “There was just no mechanics for it,” says Chapman, so he had an operator adjusting the frames-per-second setting on the camera from 24 to 48 to 120 and back again “on the fly.” For Chapman, Raging Bull was “the last great 70s movie.” He’s speaking in a largely technical sense. This was a movie that took traditional, mechanical techniques to their limit—by the 90s, digital techniques, created far from the set on computers, would replace the kind of work he was so laboriously doing on set. He doesn’t quite say it, but he strongly implies that there is a correlation between the kind of hard physical labor that went into Raging Bull and the muted, almost strangled humanism of its message.

Continúa

Critic's notebook: 'Shutter Island' as a new-music haven (Los Angeles Times)

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The trailers at the cineplex the other day included the usual summer blockbuster suspects showing off their special effects -- one cartoonish morph after another after another. Every soundtrack was loaded down with the same super-deep, but sonically shallow, electronic bass. I wasn’t sure what felt more depressingly manufactured: a deserted and alienating L.A. Live, where I happened to be, or the expensive nonsense in the nearly empty new Regal Cinema, which boasts very big subwoofers.

Then “Shutter Island” began, and yet more bass. But this time it was the sound of a foghorn, and it had the rich, compelling texture of music. It was music. It was also a real, old-fashioned foghorn. Out of this sonic relic grew French horns, as if they had been there all along struggling to get out. The misty Boston harbor was on the screen, compelling and mysterious as a painting by Turner. I was transported. Music, sound effects and cinematography joined to evoke a sense of place and mood as only they can in great cinema and only, these days, when Hollywood looks the other way.

That opening music turned out to be Ingram Marshall’s haunting “Fog Tropes.” The 1981 new-music classic found its way onto the screen thanks to the famed singer, songwriter and guitarist Robbie Robertson, who was music supervisor for “Shutter Island.” And Marshall’s wonderful piece, which was a hit of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recent West Coast, Left Coast festival, is only the beginning of a remarkable and gratifying collection of classic avant-garde scores Robertson has assembled for Martin Scorsese’s new, and I think mostly misunderstood, film.

You certainly wouldn’t know it from the awful album cover – which looks like your typical schlock horror film soundtrack recording – but Robertson’s two-CD set of music from “Shutter Island,” released by Rhino, proves to be an excellent compilation of short pieces by John Cage, John Adams, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Alfred Schnittke, Max Richter, Nam June Paik and that otherworldly Italian, Giacinto Scelsi. Brian Eno, Mahler and Dinah Washington also find their welcome way into the mix.

How did this happen?

After seeing the film, I reached Robertson on the phone. He explained that he has been a fan of these composers for decades. In fact, he said that sometime around 1969, in his years as a member of the Band, he was so moved when he first heard Penderecki’s disturbing “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” that he began a correspondence with the Polish composer, and they became musical friends.

As for “Shutter Island,” Robertson said, “the opportunity to show off these brilliant composers really makes me feel good.” It has been something he’s wanted to do for a long time. “I’d always thought Cage’s ‘Root of an Unfocus’ ” – which is for prepared piano – “would be great in a movie. And when Marty sent me the script, this is just where it went.”

That script is, on the surface, a psychological thriller, and it is being obnoxiously marketed as a scare-athon. The reviews have been, as they say, mixed, with the music thought of as melodramatic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Robertson says he wanted something that didn’t sound like typical film music and it is the boldness of these composers that appealed to him. “In the back of my mind was the thought, why don’t we have some geniuses who could really amplify the emotional ideas?”

At first, Roberston says, this notion threw even Scorsese -- whose relationship with Robertson began with the 1978 documentary of the Band, “The Last Waltz.” “ ‘Shutter Island’ is the eighth movie I’d worked on with Marty, and it was the first time his response was, ‘Oh, man, I don’t know what to do with that.’ ”

But Scorsese is a musical director and he clearly did know what to do with it. Although he didn’t ignore the throbbing possibilities of the Passacaglia movement of Penderecki’s Third Symphony, most of the music is used so subtly that even the geekiest new-music geek will have trouble identifying everything. I think I got maybe 60%.

Robertson went through a lot of trouble to make things work as well. He pointed out that while everyone agrees the Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Ligeti’s “Lontano” is the best, he chose the Vienna Philharmonic recording under Claudio Abbado because he thought the warmth of the Vienna sound suited the film better.

But the real brilliance of this score is that the music doesn’t cue the action or explain anything. It adds emotional texture, serving as an alternate universe for a film that has at its essence an alternate universe. Still, I do think it's one alternate universe too many to present this excellent introduction to late 20th century music on CD as horror film music.

-- Mark Swed

"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (críticas)

LOS ANGELES TIMES By Betsy Sharkey

February 19, 2010

In "Shutter Island," director Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition with its smarter than you'd think cops, their tougher than you'd imagine cases to crack and enough nods to the classic genre for an all-night parlor game.

It's 1954, the heart of the Cold War, with a conspiracy theory around every corner, when Leonardo DiCaprio's U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, played by Mark Ruffalo, are dispatched to an asylum for the criminally insane to investigate a dicey disappearance. One of the facility's most notorious patients, a young mother who drowned her three children, has somehow vanished from a room monitored 24 hours a day, its door bolted from the outside.

But there are deeper mysteries here, and Scorsese has a lot more on his mind than one crazy inmate on the loose. The A-bomb threat is ever present, memories of Nazi death camps linger and rumors of questionable scientific experiments by the asylum's doctors are circulating. Though the more central question, gathering force like the coming hurricane, is the very nature of sanity and insanity.

Bit by bit, the filmmakers begin to shift all that trouble onto Teddy's shoulders, already weighed down, we've been told, by the death of his wife and the knowledge that her killer is an inmate at the asylum.

But Teddy's problems are never too much for Scorsese and DiCaprio, who in their fourth collaboration have developed an ease evident in every scene. Here the actor slips so deeply inside Teddy's skin that it allows his anxiety to creep under ours, while the director makes the most of that naked vulnerability, moving the camera in so close we can see the look in his eye, and that is unsettling indeed.

All the action takes place on a remote island off the Eastern Seaboard where Ashecliffe Hospital sits, with the sinister look of things serving to ratchet up the sense of jeopardy. Dante Ferretti, in his seventh film with Scorsese, sets the stage with his production design, the asylum itself a looming Gothic architectural throwback that never looks less than intimidating. There is a carefully orchestrated soundtrack from another of the director's pals, singer-songwriter Robbie Robertson, literally coming in with a crescendo every time you feel the urge to whisper, "Cue ominous music."

Between the psychopaths, the psychiatrists and the skeletons in Teddy's closet, the line between reality and delusion, sanity and insanity, soon begins to blur. It is here that the film really begins playing around with the psyche, both Teddy's and ours, though the agenda is laid out from director of photography Robert Richardson's first images of Teddy reeling from seasickness in the claustrophobic latrine of the prison ferry on the ride over -- tortured eyes looking back at us from the mirror as he splashes water onto his face.

Water is an image Scorsese returns to again and again -- the ocean that isolates the island, the relentless hurricane that rages down, the drowned children of the missing inmate. Peril, rather than life-sustaining, seems to be the relevant allegory here, so you soon start worrying when anyone turns up wet.

Using noir's narrative style, often to brilliant effect, it is pure pleasure to watch as Teddy parries with his partner, the hospital staff led by Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the inmates or the security detail, with John Carroll Lynch particularly good as the brick wall of Deputy Warden McPherson. It's probably never better than in a confrontation with the shadow king of Ashecliffe Hospital, Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring, Teddy throwing down hypotheses suggesting his guilt like a gauntlet, Dr. Naehring deflecting each one with bemused irony.

In its own way, Laeta Kalogridis' screenplay, which is based on the Dennis Lehane bestselling novel, turns into Teddy's most formidable adversary -- never letting him rest as obstacles are thrown in his path and paranoia rises with every step he takes.

We're pulled deep into a maze so complex it threatens to cloud the story, beginning with Teddy's tortured memories of his wife, Delores (Michelle Williams), and the migraines that plague him, to say nothing of his World War II soldiering days, including the liberation of Dachau and the horrors that implies. When the missing patient (Emily Mortimer as the younger Rachel, Patricia Clarkson the elder) mysteriously turns up, Teddy's gut tells him a lot of questions remain. As if by design, the hurricane finally blows in, cutting off access to the mainland and creating a dark and stormy night filled with scary sounds, ideal conditions for sleuthing around all those off-limits areas that any decent insane asylum has. While it's clear Scorsese is having great fun tightening the screws at every turn, some of the psychological tension that should have the crackle and shock of electricity in a thriller like this is lost in the crowd.

There is always a sense that Teddy's running out of time, and for a while we don't know exactly why. Once we do, Scorsese sets about tidying things up a bit too fast, like a college professor who knows he's got to let the class out, so let's just get through this, shall we.

Whether it's a rushed dénouement or a tendency to overindulge in delusions, the flaws are never enough to do permanent damage to the film. Ultimately, Scorsese has given us a new noir classic, though watching Di- Caprio's Teddy twist in the wind while his mind unravels would be satisfying enough.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com

THE NEW YORK TIMES By A. O. SCOTT

“Shutter Island” takes place off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954. I’m sorry, that should be OFF THE COAST OF MASSACHUSETTS! IN 1954! since every detail and incident in the movie, however minor, is subjected to frantic, almost demented (and not always unenjoyable) amplification. The wail of strangled cellos accompanies shots of the titular island, a sinister, rain-lashed outcropping that is home to a mental hospital for the CRIMINALLY INSANE! The color scheme is lurid, and the camera movements telegraph anxiety. Nothing is as it seems. Something TERRIBLE is afoot.

Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself, directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a peculiar contraption of a thriller by Dennis Lehane. Like Shutter Island in the opening scenes, the full dimensions of the catastrophe come into view only gradually. At first everything is fine, or at least not quite right in a way that seems agreeably intriguing. Mr. Scorsese uses his considerable formal dexterity — his intimate, comprehensive understanding of how sound and image work together to create meanings and moods — to conjure a tingly atmosphere of uncertainty and dread.

The vessel of these anxieties is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Teddy Daniels, a United States marshal taking a ferry ride out to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Mr. DiCaprio, having grown perhaps overly fond of his accent from “The Departed,” brings it along for the ride, and it spreads through the movie like a contagious disease. Teddy’s partner (pahtnah), Chuck Aule, played by Mark (Mahk) Ruffalo, is supposed to be from the Pacific Northwest but he seems to have left all his R’s back in Seattle. Michelle Williams pops up in smudgy, color-drenched memories and hallucinations as Teddy’s dead wife, Dolores, her intonations as thick and clammy as chowder.

Those dialect-coached Boston inflections predominate in “Shutter Island,” but are not the only voices heard on the grounds of the asylum, where the patients perambulate like zombies and the orderlies lurk like vengeful specters. Ben Kingsley is Dr. Cawley, the psychiatrist in charge, with silky upper-crust menace in his voice and a diabolical little beard on his chin. Max von Sydow spouts Freudianisms in insinuating Germanic tones that remind Teddy — and of course not only Teddy — of Nazis, an association that helps to induce gratuitous flashbacks of corpses stacked outside death-camp barracks.

Those images emanate from Teddy’s troubled mind, the status of which is one of the movie’s chief mysteries. There are many others besides. Intimations of conspiracy, supernaturalism, cold war shenanigans and a whole lot more float around in the atmosphere, which is convulsed by operatically bad weather and the energetic furrowing of Mr. DiCaprio’s brow. As he interviews patients and staff members, trying to figure out how a woman named Rachel Solando could have vanished, barefoot, from her cell, Teddy is plagued by headaches, bad dreams and paranoia. Everyone he talks to seems to be harboring a secret, but what can it be?

Is there some kind of espionage-related psychological experimentation going on? Is it connected in some way to grisly medical research undertaken during the Third Reich? Are Dr. Cawley’s methods, which he claims are a humane advance over the cruelty and superstition of the past, really a form of madness in their own right? And what about the strange coincidence that Shutter Island apparently houses the firebug who caused Dolores’s death?

All of these riddles send out tendrils of implication that end up strangling the movie, the plot of which does not so much thicken as clog and coagulate. Mr. Scorsese, ever resourceful, draws on the influence of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of carefully orchestrated psychological confusion, and also nods in the direction of Mario Bava, the Italian horror maestro whose gothic fantasias routinely assert the triumph of sensation over sense. Mr. Scorsese’s camera sense effectively fills every scene with creepiness, but sustained, gripping suspense seems beyond his grasp.

And the movie’s central dramatic problem — the unstable boundary between the reality of Shutter Island and Teddy’s perception of it — becomes less interesting as the story lurches along. You begin to suspect almost immediately that a lot of narrative misdirection is at work here, as MacGuffins and red herrings spawn and swarm. But just when the puzzle should accelerate, the picture slows down, pushing poor Teddy into a series of encounters with excellent actors (Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley, Patricia Clarkson) who provide painstaking exposition of matters that the audience already suspects are completely irrelevant.

Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.

There are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt. But in this case the equivocation, the uncertainty, seems to come from the filmmaker himself, who seems to have been unable to locate what it is in this movie he cares about, beyond any particular, local formal concern. He has, in the past, used characters whose grasp of reality was shaky — or who stubbornly lived in realities of their own making — as vehicles for psychological exploration and even social criticism. But both Teddy’s mind and the world of Shutter Island are closed, airless systems, illuminated with flashes of virtuosity but with no particular heat, conviction or purpose.

“Shutter Island” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Blood, swearing, cigarettes.

SHUTTER ISLAND

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; production designer, Dante Ferretti; produced by Mr. Scorsese, Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer and Bradley J. Fischer; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Teddy Daniels), Mark Ruffalo (Chuck Aule), Ben Kingsley (Dr. Cawley), Michelle Williams (Dolores), Emily Mortimer (Rachel Solando), Patricia Clarkson (Rachel Solando), Jackie Earle Haley (George Noyce) and Max von Sydow (Dr. Naehring).

VILLAGE VOICE
By Nick Pinkerton

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby's parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory in flashback and dream. Now topside, he joins his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), and their destination looms into view: an ominous hunk of rock in Boston Harbor that houses Ashecliffe Asylum, where they've been assigned to find a missing inmate.

Pounded eighth notes by Krzysztof Penderecki score a gathering-storm approach that anticlimaxes at a tidy, ecclesiastical-looking brick campus. They're shown the grounds by progressive chief physician Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley), who manages to seem both a natty, patrician liberal, circa 1954, and a bit of a satyr, with his Anton LaVey bald head/goatee combo and ironic twinkle—an ambiguous balance Kingsley keeps seesawing throughout. They also meet Cawley's colleague, Herr Doktor Naehring (Max von Sydow)—and Daniels, an ex-GI who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, takes an immediate dislike to the German.

As Daniels and Aule begin to investigate, there's a sense that their presence is an inside joke with the staff, that they're being given rehearsed misinformation. Daniels reveals that he'd heard sinister rumors about Ashecliffe long before this assignment, and not even a pretense of cooperation and normalcy can outlast their first hurricane-force dark-and-stormy-night on the island, when they trade their soaked civvies for orderly uniforms. (The film is elemental, whipped with fire, ash, snow, paper, bracken, and torrents of rain.)

As the outline of a conspiracy comes into view, Daniels's digging brings on strobing headaches, hallucinations, and a shrinking list of trustworthies that ultimately includes only his dead wife, dolorous Dolores, visiting him as a beyond-the-grave Technicolor prophet (Michelle Williams, not quite right for "ethereal"; it doesn't help that she's upstaged by Emily Mortimer's psychopath, who takes only one scene opposite DiCaprio to establish an immediate and spellbinding intimacy). As for DiCaprio, well, he'll never step onscreen and immediately suggest a liver-and-onions Greatest Generation Ralph Meeker he-man—Ted Levine's warden almost eats him at one point—but he has made suffering a specialty, and does so with an abandon that is frightening.

Production design maestro Dante Ferretti's island is a rugged symbolist mythscape, pocketed with hidden places: soothsayers' sea caves, Ward C, a squat Civil War–era fort where the most violent offenders are kept in a Goya madhouse, and, beyond it, the ultimate locked door—to the lighthouse! Scorsese's return to his Roger Corman AIP roots is an object lesson in the proximity of high and low culture—Shutter Island is lousy with modernist references, soundtracked by avant-garde 20th-century composers, pretentious in the best Pulp-y tradition.

138 minutes is dangerously epic for a talky thriller, but you forget the time and even whether the plot makes sense—and if you don't notice, it doesn't matter. Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.

Though the film takes place entirely out-to-sea, the mainland isn't left behind—it's concentrated here into a midcentury chamber of manmade horrors. Loonies praise their island as a safe haven from news "about atolls, about A-bombs." There are rumors suggesting the House Committee on Un-American Activities (!) is dabbling in brainwashing experiments. Daniels flashes back repeatedly to Dachau: a camp Kapo choking in his own blood; a firing line tracking shot popping with squibs like a string of firecrackers; piled corpses frozen into a horrible sculpture. No violence is unsuitable for aestheticization; at one point in the film's web of visions, the perpetrator of a triple filicide points proudly to her handiwork and says, "See, aren't they beautiful?"—and DP Robert Richardson's image concurs.

Scorsese is as famous a movie lover as a moviemaker. This is manifest in his too-much-discussed homages, but also in his understanding of how his characters have themselves been shaped by entertainment, how they model themselves as actors in the American drama—Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, or Bill the Butcher addressing his public with Edwin Forrest brio at a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Gangs of New York. (The announced Scorsese project, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, dealing with our nation's premier self-publicist ham, has enormous potential.) Without revealing too much of an ending that everyone will soon insist on telling you their opinion of, Shutter Island, deep in its camp gothic trappings, seems to me a flea-pit occult history, with Daniels's headspace a confusion of "Hideous Secrets of the Nazi Horror Cult" schlock, hard-ass Mickey Spillane machismo, Cold War psychic confusion, and the post-traumatic bad dreams of ex-servicemen.

In his documentary Personal Journey, Scorsese spoke of the '50s as a time "when the subtext became as important as the apparent subject matter, or even more important"—and in Shutter Island, his most distinctly '50s movie, he replays the trash culture of the era as the manifestation of an anguished subconscious.

Berlinale 2010 - Shutter Island, Submarino, If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle (Clarín)

Link (Clarín)

Cue the Director’s Adrenaline (The New York Times)

Link

February 7, 2010

Film

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

MARTIN SCORSESE’S dark, twisty detective thriller “Shutter Island” is set in 1954, in the full flowering of what W. H. Auden had, just a few years earlier, called the Age of Anxiety. “I don’t know, maybe I’m stuck in that time,” Mr. Scorsese said recently, sounding a little weary as he talked about a film that “started out as an entertainment, though I guess I don’t really know how to do that,” he said. “It always seems to become something else.”

“ ‘The Departed’ was that way too,” he added, and almost sighed, though he’s not a man who pauses much to catch his breath. If he seemed a bit tired on this bright cold afternoon in New York City, it’s perhaps because he had been up late in the editing room, cutting the pilot he directed for an HBO gangster series called “Boardwalk Empire.” He is 67 now, firmly in lifetime-achievement-award territory — he was in fact just back from a trip to Los Angeles to receive one of those not-dead-yet honors at the Golden Globes — and wears his years and stature comfortably. His dress is age appropriate: dignified (neutral-color sport coat, good shoes) but casual (no tie). His rapid-fire, unmistakably New York conversational style is slightly less manic than it once was, a tad more patient; his characteristic manner now is one of affable enthusiasm, like a hip priest. And he has had, by any measure, as satisfying a decade as a middle-age American filmmaker can reasonably expect: the work has been bold and exciting, and the acclaim has been steady, never less than respectful, often perilously close to reverent.

Three years ago “The Departed” won him his first Oscar, after more than four decades of moviemaking (and a longer lifetime of crazed, inveterate moviegoing); he can afford to rest. But he is still, it appears, determined to continue making the kind of film that will, like “Shutter Island,” become “something else” for him.

Based on an exceptionally tricky 2003 mystery novel by Dennis Lehane, “Shutter Island” wears its something-elseness proudly, even defiantly. It’s a true oddity, an outlier, as isolated and enigmatic as the gloomy, rain-whipped island on which the action takes place. The hero, a federal marshal named Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a tormented soul, the type of man to whom Mr. Scorsese has never been a stranger, from his first movie, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” (1968), through “Mean Streets” (1973) and “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “Raging Bull” (1980) and “The Aviator” (2004), in which Mr. DiCaprio played a Howard Hughes beset by hallucinations, bizarre phobias and creeping paranoia. Teddy’s emotional troubles manifest themselves, for most of the film, as very bad dreams — many of them about his dead wife — and the most spectacular movie migraines since James Cagney in “White Heat.”

“When I read the script,” Mr. Scorsese said, “I was just taken by the character, felt very empathetic with him.”

Teddy, accompanied by his curiously passive partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), is on Shutter Island to investigate a disappearance. This island, an unprepossessing chunk of rock out in Boston Harbor, houses an asylum for the criminally insane, one of whom — a woman who murdered her children — has somehow managed to vanish from her cell. We learn fairly early on that Teddy might have other agendas: the man he believes killed his wife may be an inmate there, and he’s suspicious of the motives of the asylum’s psychiatric staff, represented here by the reliably ambiguous Ben Kingsley and the great, gaunt Max von Sydow (who, thanks to Ingmar Bergman, has done time on more than a few bleak, chilly, madness-inducing islands himself).

What makes “Shutter Island” feel so peculiar for this director to have made isn’t the troubled protagonist, or the detective-movie plot mechanics. It’s the claustrophobia, the tight, hermetic, locked-down structure that’s so unusual for Mr. Scorsese, whose films are generally a lot more expansive. As Mr. DiCaprio, who has starred in all four of the nondocumentary features Mr. Scorsese has directed since 2002, explained, “With scripts like ‘Gangs of New York’ and ‘The Aviator’ there’s a little more flexibility, certain things that can be done to reshape the character, but in scripts like ‘Shutter Island’ there are too many interlocking segments. If you take one piece out, the story starts to fall apart.”

Mr. Scorsese makes the structure sound more delicate yet: “With the editing we found that just putting in one reaction shot could throw the scene off completely.” The movie’s balance is, like its hero’s, fragile.

Most of the film was shot at an abandoned mental institution in Medfield, Mass., which had, Mr. Scorsese said, “the feeling of a trap, a labyrinth — a labyrinth of the mind, which is what I wanted.”

It’s hard not to suspect, as you listen to him discoursing with a certain relish about the technical problems of the film and the rigors of shooting in a mental hospital — “It’s not a good feeling, being there every day” — that he has come to a point in his career where he actually thrives on difficulty, almost can’t do without it. Mr. DiCaprio described the process of working out the nuances of Teddy’s character as “pretty intense, because I didn’t really understand how emotionally complex this character is until Marty and I started breaking down this cathartic journey he goes on.” He paused and added: “When you’re working with someone like Martin Scorsese, you know you’re going to have to go places emotionally that you didn’t ever foresee.”

For Mr. Scorsese that’s entertainment. Some filmmakers as they grow older begin to pare down their styles, to produce mellow, autumnal works that attempt to express with serene simplicity the accrued wisdom of their lives. Does that sound like Martin Scorsese? His movies have always been fueled by nervous energy and huge uprushes of adrenaline, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine him doing without some kind of emotional turbulence, even if he has to induce it by sheer force of will.

Or stimulants may sometimes be required. With Mr. Scorsese’s filmmaking, the drugs of choice are primarily the memory of old movies, and the selection of music for his collagelike soundtracks. Robbie Robertson, formerly of the Band, met Mr. Scorsese during the filming of the concert documentary “The Last Waltz” (1978) and has collaborated with him on several movies since. Mr. Robertson, credited as music supervisor on “Shutter Island,” said: “Marty just has this unique gift with regard to music in film. It’s one of those mysteries. You could tell right from the opening scene of ‘Mean Streets,’ with the Ronettes doing ‘Be My Baby.’ It isn’t about the song, or the lyrics, it only has to do with the Wall of Sound, and that’s why it’s so beautiful.”

On “Shutter Island,” Mr. Robertson said, “This was the first time in all these years that he’s ever said to me, ‘God, I don’t know what to do with this material music-wise.’ ” The solution they came up with, weirdly appropriate to the anxious era in which the movie is set, was to use modern classical music in the way that, in previous films, they would deploy brief, timed charges of rock or pop or blues: here the sonic blasts come from composers like Krzysztof Penderecki, John Adams, John Cage, Gyorgy Ligeti and Morton Feldman. And this music, much of it dissonant, stark, hauntingly repetitious or plain spooky, certainly amps up the film’s thick atmosphere of dread. “With something like Penderecki’s ‘Passacaglia,’ ” Mr. Scorsese said, “it’s definitely bold and to me it reflects what’s going on inside Teddy. If you’re with the film, with the character on this strange journey he’s on, that’s the kind of music you hear in your head.”

The funny thing is, a fair amount of the fierce, moody modern music in “Shutter Island” sounds a bit like ’50s movie music too, something from an angst-drenched psychological drama by Elia Kazan, say, or Nicholas Ray. It’s inward-turning music, lonely music. Pop songs are used extremely sparingly, because popular music implies a larger world, millions listening, maybe dancing — the world outside this island and this tormented hero’s mind.

The old-movie memories have a part to play in this insular universe too. “I love memory,” Mr. Scorsese said, “I mean, I’m a preservationist.” (Twenty years ago he was the prime mover in the creation of the Film Foundation, which restores and protects endangered movies, and still serves on its board.)

He always shows classic films to his cast and crew. “We saw ‘Laura,’ ‘Out of the Past’ and of course ‘Vertigo,’ ” Mr. DiCaprio said, “all these movies about obsessed detectives coming to terms with themselves through their investigations.” He added: “He wanted a genre feel to the film, and wanted it to be specific to this particular era. It’s almost like he’s accessing his dreams or something, the dreams being all those movies. They’re like memories coming back to him.”

So when Mr. Scorsese talks about “Shutter Island,” he also inevitably needs to speak of remembered films like those of Jacques Tourneur, who made the doomy, complex noir “Out of the Past” (1947). “I like watching ‘Out of the Past’ repeatedly,” he said, “because I never know quite where I am in it, I don’t know what’s the beginning, the middle or the end. I screened it for Leo and the other actors just to show that sense of a character not knowing where he is at a given point in time and trying to figure it out from scene to scene.” (He confided, “I didn’t think it was going over at all, but at the end Leo applauded and said to me, ‘That’s the coolest movie I ever saw.’ ”)

That nervous sense of not knowing exactly where you are, beginning, middle or end, seems somehow vitally important to Mr. Scorsese, who, although closer to the end of his career, has for the past decade been making movies with the jittery vigor of a beginner, trying on different genres, different sounds, different actors (with Mr. DiCaprio as a constant) in a valiant attempt to keep himself sufficiently disoriented to create his kind of something else.

The run of Scorsese movies between “Gangs of New York” (2002) and “Shutter Island” (which also includes his 2008 Rolling Stones concert documentary “Shine a Light”) is perhaps his liveliest, most varied, and most consistently inventive stretch since the 1970s. He finds a way to remain charged up, by any means necessary, even if it involves making a film as relentlessly and baroquely interior as “Shutter Island,” which has the nightmare architecture of a Piranesi prison. Whatever works. And what works for Mr. Scorsese, usually, is some form of unease. He may or may not be stuck in the ’50s, but for him it’s always, one way or another, an age of anxiety.

"Shutter Island": Entrevistas y Detrás de Escena

Tal vez aparezca antes también, pero al menos yo alcanzo a reconocer a Celina Murga justo al final de este último clip.

Radio Micropsia - Episodio 11

Por Radio Nacional (FM 93.7), domingo de 20 a 22hs.
O por internet, entrando por aquí.

Tras dos domingos de vacaciones --los que se cubrieron con una buena selección musical--, regresa el programa en vivo, otra vez con invitados. Celina Murga y Juan Villegas (no, el de la foto no es Juan, ya saben...), directores, productores, guionistas, marido, mujer y padres, estarán en el piso para contarnos, bueno, varias cosas. Desde la experiencia de Celina con Scorsese en el rodaje de "La isla siniestra" (película que ambos vimos y de la que vamos a hablar) hasta su nuevo proyecto, pasando obviamente por "Una semana solos", para mí la mejor película argentina estrenada en 2009 y nominada al premio Fipresci. Juan terminó de rodar "Ocio", junto al colega Alejandro Lingenti, filme basado en un texto de Fabián Casas. Y hablaremos de eso, claro. Además de analizar el cine argentino del año que pasó y del que se viene, y del fenómeno de las mujeres directoras en la Argentina. ¿Será por CFK?

Además, música, claro. Desde el nuevo disco de David Bowie en vivo y el de covers de Peter Gabriel, hasta una selección musical femenina --haciendo honor a uno de los "ejes" de la noche-- que va de Ingrid Chavez a Rose Melberg, pasando por Emma Pollock, Scout Niblett y... Sade. Sí, Sade, que a los 51 años (por Dios, cómo pasa el tiempo!) tiene disco nuevo y está buenísimo.

Además, se regalarán entradas para curioso documental argentino con nombre brasileño y tema boliviano.

Preguntas a Scorsese y DiCaprio...

DreamWorks has lauched a pretty cool campiagn on Twitter, where fans have a chance to ask both director Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio questions about Shutter Island. In the film Leonardo DiCaprio plays one of two U.S marshals who are investigating the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane on an island in Massachusetts. Trouble arises when they are deceived by the hospital’s chief administrator. Then there is a hurricane which traps them on the island and then to top if off the inmates start rioting.

If you are interested in asking a question use the hashtags #AskLeo and #AskScorsese. For example, you could ask them both why they work with each other so much, and whether they are trying to beat Johnny Depp and Tim Burton in the collaboration department.

Their questions and answers will be weeked on Friday.

Scorsese inspires from afar, by Wes Anderson (Variety)

Many years ago, when my second film, "Rushmore," came out, I got a letter from Marty saying how much he liked it -- and "Bottle Rocket" -- and I was so thrilled. Not only was I a disciple, but I'd read "Scorsese on Scorsese" many times and listened to all his commentaries on "Raging Bull" and "Taxi Driver" on the Criterion Collection, so I felt that I'd been tutored by him without his knowledge.

Around the same time, he also contributed a profile of me to a magazine article about young filmmakers, and when I heard about it, I couldn't believe it. Shortly after, I met him in person when he invited me to a screening of "Bringing Out the Dead," and I was so pleased and excited to finally meet him, but understandably what he had on his mind was his work in progress, and it was fascinating to see him in his process.

Since then, we've kept in touch, even though he's so busy, while I've been working abroad so much. I'll get an invitation to see a movie he's screening, and in fact one of them, Renoir's "The River," really inspired me to make "The Darjeeling Limited." I'd never seen it before, and his Film Foundation had restored it, and that was the catalyst for me to spend the next few years pursuing my Indian project -- it was a direct result of Marty's invitation.

What's amazing about Marty is that he makes all these huge films and is so busy with his Film Foundation and documentary and book projects, and yet he finds time to executive produce so many projects for other filmmakers, such as Alison Anders. He really stays engaged, and I think encouraging new filmmakers is part of his credo.

-- as told to Iain Blair

"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (crítica)

By John Gholson/Cinematical

We've come to expect Martin Scorsese to swing for the fences every single time he's at bat, so when a movie comes along like Shutter Island, a pulpy, by-the-numbers thriller, it's easy to feel a slight twinge of disappointment. Here, we're dealing with a lesser work by a modern master, which is to say that Shutter Island is still a crackerjack mystery, executed with great artistic care, but it's also Scorsese working about as close as he ever has to popcorn-munching cineplex fare. It's a hard-boiled and unpretentious outing, but the individual parts of Shutter Island are greater than the whole -- particularly the cinematography by Robert Richardson and outstanding work from a dream team ensemble cast.

Leading that dream team is Leonardo DiCaprio as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, called in to a state-run mental institution on a storm-battered, rocky island on the East Coast, along with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo). The delusional murderess Rachel Solando has gone missing from her cell, leaving behind no evident clues, and with those in charge of the facility (Ben Kingsley, who needs to work with Scorsese more often, and Max Von Sydow) only forthcoming with information to the officers as it seems to suit them.

Daniels immerses himself in the investigation with unhealthy abandon, perhaps as a way to force back the memories of the recent death of his wife (Michelle Williams) at the hands of an arsonist, or, more troubling, to quiet the voices that constantly remind him of his own violent past, time spent serving out gruesome wartime justice to anonymous Nazi soldiers. Trapped on Shutter Island during a nasty storm, Daniels begins to let on to Chuck that he knows more about the hospital than anything they've learned while investigating Solando. There's a connection with Daniel's wife's killer and the institution -- a connection that Daniels is convinced leads to secret House Un-American Activities Committee-funded neurological experiments taking place in Shutter Island's nigh-impenetrable lighthouse.


The handling of this information is indicative of greater problems at work in the screenplay of Laeta Kalogridis (Pathfinder), adapting Dennis Lehane's 2003 novel. Daniels unloads soggy exposition about his wife's murderer, the island, and HUAC, in big, sudden chunks that seem to come from nowhere other than the plot demands these twists and turns exist. He just seems to know stuff when the film wants him to know stuff, and the more coincidental information he seemingly knows about the island, the more determined the folks who occupy the island seem to be in keeping him stuck there (yet letting him run free all over the facility).

This created a problem for me -- I became less interested in the mystery that moves the film, that of Rachel Solando, and much more interested in the "why" of Daniels getting the run-around from doctors and patients alike. I couldn't figure out to what end it would serve to have a U.S. Marshal come out to help with a dangerous situation, then have him stomp around the whole place hamstrung by selective lying on the part of the institution. The film loses focus as Daniels loses his focus (his preoccupation with the lighthouse superseding his drive to find Solando) -- creating situations that make you question your own suspension of disbelief over the questions at hand in the plot itself.

It's to the film's credit then that it answers all pressing questions by the time it reaches its finale, including those questions of "why" that I'd found distracting through most of the film's running time. If my brain hadn't been allowed to wander, trying to figure out character motivations in Kalogridis' convoluted script, I'm sure the wrap-up would've had a greater emotional impact on me. Scorcese certainly gets the best from DiCaprio in those final scenes, elevating what could've been a forgettable thriller into an exceptional performance piece.

DiCaprio's violent streak is utterly believable, though we never see it fully on display. There's rage in Teddy Daniels' eyes and a body language that speaks of high-blood pressure and binge drinking. He's perpetually sweaty and perpetually troubled, about a great many disturbing things, and it makes for an interesting contrast against everyone he comes in contact with in Shutter Island -- from the oddly peaceful Dr. Cawley (Kingsley) to the jovial alpha-male hospital guard played by Ted Levine (who attempts to verbally goad Daniels into violence during one of the film's most memorable scenes). If Shutter Island's delay to 2010 kept anyone out of the 2009 Oscar race, it was Leonardo DiCaprio.

Scorsese gets fabulous work from cinematographer Robert Richardson as well (as usual). Richardson lensed Casino, Bringing Out the Dead, and The Aviator for this director, and the two, when paired, seem especially interested in playing with color palettes. Shutter Island's flashbacks and dreams are vivid beyond belief, offering an eye-popping respite from the grey, rain-soaked cliffs that so often fill the frame. Story quibbling aside, Shutter Island is high on atmosphere, in large part due to the visuals, and the collaboration between Scorsese and Richardson actually feels like the two men having a blast with their craft.

I'm certainly sure Scorsese is having fun. While I wouldn't describe Shutter Island as a "fun" movie, its B-movie roots show through with obvious abandon. Everything exists in a heightened reality here. Everyone is a little too sinister; the cops are a little too hard-nosed; the shadows loom a little too large. Shutter Island, despite all of its flaws, is not a career misstep for the director, just a bit of a sidestep. I have no doubts that Scorsese made exactly the film he wanted to make, with all its corkscrew logic and earnest intensity, but it's missing a bit of the visceral punch we're used to from a Scorcese work. Maybe we're a little bit spoiled?

Note: Shutter Island will arrive in theaters on February 19th, 2010.

The 60th Berlinale: Films by Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski to celebrate world premieres in the Competition programme

The first seven titles for the Competition of the 60th Berlin International Film Festival have been confirmed. The films selected so far are from Austria , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Croatia , France , Germany , India , Iran , Turkey , the UK and the USA .

This first group of films selected for the Competition is characterized by up-and-coming young directors, stars and masters of filmmaking like Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski.

“The Competition of the 60th anniversary Berlinale will be marked by a mix of styles and genres, by exciting newcomers and renowned directors,” says Festival Director Dieter Kosslick.

The following films have been confirmed for the Competition programme so far:

Bal (Honey) Turkey / Germany
by Semih Kaplanoglu (Süt/Milk, Yumurta/Egg, Melegin Düsüsü/Angel’s Fall)
with Bora Altas, Erdal Besikcioglu, Tülin Özen, Alev Ucarer, Ayse Altay
World premiere

Der Räuber (The Robber) Austria / Germany

by Benjamin Heisenberg (Sleeper, Max-Ophuels-Preis 2006)

with Andreas Lust, Franziska Weisz

World premiere

My Name Is Khan India

by Karan Johar

with Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol

Out of competition

Na Putu (On the Path) Bosnia and Herzegovina / Austria / Germany / Croatia

by Jasmila Žbanić (Grbavica, Golden Bear 2006)

with Zrinka Cvitešić (Shooting Star 2010), Leon Lucev, Ermin Bravo, Mirjana Karanović

World premiere

Shekarchi (The Hunter) Germany / Iran

by Rafi Pitts (Zemestan - It's Winter)

with Rafi Pitts, Mitra Hajjar, Ali Nicksaulat, Hassan Ghalenoi

World premiere

Shutter Island USA

by Martin Scorsese (The Departed, Aviator, Cape Fear)

with Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Sir Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow
World premiere / Out of competition

The Ghost Writer France / Germany / UK

by Roman Polanski (The Pianist, Oscar 2002, China Town, Cul-de-sac, Golden Bear 1966)

with Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams

World premiere

A total of 26 films will be selected for the Competition section of the 60th Berlin International Film Festival. Further Competition title confirmations will be announced in January 2010.