Shutter Island - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Leonardo Dicaprio, Ben Kingsley
Director: Martin Scorsese

In baseball, a 300-win pitcher is considered historically great. Sportswriters try to trumpet the next 300 game winner when a phenomenal young pitcher puts together 2 or 3 great seasons at the beginning of his career. As it turns out, 300 game winners are not defined by the start of their career, but by the end of it - 300 game winners, in the modern era, are pitchers who pitch very well between the ages of 35 and 40, and perhaps even beyond that.

My elaborate and clunky sports analogy is a setup to discuss Martin Scorsese's place in the film canon. As I see it, many of the truly great artists are like those 300 game winners - people like Beethoven, Kurosawa, Dostoyevsky, and Shakespeare were still pushing artistic boundaries right up to their death; their 'greatest' works came in old age. I wonder if Shutter Island is a step in that direction - as a mindfuck, it's top notch, but mindfucks don't always make great films. In fact, I'd say they never do (and yes, I am including Psycho). So while Shutter Island is a masterful construction, there's only so far a director can go with this sort of film. It's not a genre picture, and Scorsese is using his name to be able to push through a film whose commercial viability would be dubious with another director attached. I am still hoping for greater than this.