In one scene in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Federal Marshal Edward Daniels interrogates a jovial but visibly on-edge patient at the mental institution to which he’s been sent to investigate the disappearance of a patient. In order to buy time to pass Daniels a clandestine note, the patient asks his partner Chuck to get her a glass of water. When he returns with it, she picks it up and starts drinking it. In the next shot, she’s just miming drinking it and putting it down–there’s no glass there at all. In the next shot, she puts it down, empty. In the next shot, it’s half full. None of this is ever noticed by any of the characters. I doubt it was noticed by very many people in the audience.

That, in one sequence, is why I love seeing Martin Scorsese movies. You know, maybe it’s my immersion in comics that’s leading me to call this out–my increasing conviction that greatness stems from using as tools the facets of your medium others see as mere props. But when I sit myself down and place myself in the hands of someone like Scorsese, there’s a good chance that he’ll, say, be deliberately sloppy with shot-to-shot continuity–the positions of the actors’ bodies don’t line up properly, their mouths aren’t synced with the dialogue, snippets of time will disappear like miniature jump cuts–simply to show that something’s…not…quite…right. It’s not some jittery effect, what back in the Natural Born Killers days people used to call MTV editing; the effect is every bit as classic-Hollywood as the cliffs and towers straight out of Hitchcock, deep focus shots straight out of Welles, or the mightily effective, star-of-the-show contemporary-classical score. It’s just a sign that the filmmaker is in control of his medium, and is going to spend the next couple hours using it. It’s not a guarantee of success, necessarily–I understand that people’s mileage with late-period Scorsese varies, and I understand why. But it’s a guarantee of effort. It’s a sign that if the movie fails, it’s not failing because it’s trying to do something else but falling short. It’s doing what it wants to do.

What does it want to do? Two things most importantly, I think. The first, which is another reason I enjoy Scorsese movies, is showcase performances. This starts with his lead. Leo has his detractors, obviously, but in much the same way that his Departed castmate Matt Damon has parlayed his vacant all-Americanness into a career of playing cold-blooded killers, DiCaprio has taken the pinched features of his aging babyface and, in his collaborations with Scorsese at least, transformed himself into a little ball of seething guilt and rage. He’s like Hollywood’s Red Lantern. I empathize with manner in which his characters constantly battle back the knowledge that they’re not up to the task at hand, whatever it may be. Daniels, with his nightmares and his nightmarish memories constantly bleeding into one another, constantly looking like a drowned rat, may be the apotheosis of that type.

Beyond that, I wish I could remember who I read saying that the movie veered dangerously close to Martin Scorsese’s Circus of the Stars, but you say that like it’s a bad thing, whoever you are! Jackie Earle Haley out-Rorschaching Rorschach, Elias Koteas being creepy and grotesque, Max Von Sydow (who has been old for close to 40 years, somehow) being a good German, Ted Levine sending out sonar echoes of Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs being another super-obvious reference point for Marty) as the spectacularly bloody-minded warden, Ben Kingsley as bald and sinister as ever…I do not mind attending this circus, no siree. Emily Mortimer and Michelle Williams both impress and discomfit in their roles as the women Daniels sets out to rescue as well.

Which leads us to the other thing Shutter Island wants to do, a high-wire act linking Scorsese’s straightest thriller since Cape Fear with genuine, real-world horrors. I say by all means let the corpses of Dachau be used to frighten and terrify. Let the execution of the guards by the American liberators go on and on like a sick joke, unfolding horizontally as if each soldier patiently waited his turn to slaughter the slaughterers. Linger on the frozen bodies as they pour out of the cars of a freight train like a glacial waterfall. And later, dig into the horror of the murder of children. Cover the actors with their blood, carry around their bodies, wade into the water in which they drown and float. Make your whole movie about the mind’s inability to cope with horror, to the point where the end comes like blessed relief and the rollicking delivery of the twist feels like a blade cutting away the bad parts. Don’t we have enough monsters?

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