Word: islanders
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Expensive movies from notable directors usually open toward the end of the year, for timely attention in the Oscar season. Martin Scorsese's last three features - Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed, all starring Leonardo DiCaprio - all followed that rule. The latest Scorsese-DiCaprio pairing, Shutter Island, was originally to come out last October, in plenty of time to beat the Academy drum. When the film's distributor, Paramount, abruptly switched the release date to February 2010, the move was taken as an admission that the movie lacked either Oscar gravitas or box-office clout. In vain...
Instead, Shutter Island killed, and the Paramount brass looks like a winning brain trust. According to studio estimates, the movie will have earned $40.2 million in its first three days. That's the biggest debut weekend for any Scorsese picture (The Departed was his previous top opener), and any DiCaprio (yes, including Titanic). Turns out the R-rated whodunit - with Leo playing a U.S. marshal searching for a killer in an insane asylum - benefited from an effective ad spot on the Super Bowl and a week with no other new films in wide release. Scorsese's very limited competition came...
...plot of the book and the film is also weirdly similar to that of this weekend's other new film, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, which has a stranger visiting a rainswept island near Boston after someone's mysterious disappearance and trying to unravel a conspiracy that may threaten his life. That picture - with a gallery of unreliable characters weaving a web of lies around the baffled hero, who must discover the perpetrator by searching for clues in hidden notes - has been widely compared to Hitchcock and film noir; but it might also be Scorsese's tribute to Polanski...
From the moment he enters Lang's island compound, the Ghost feels thwarted by the P.M. and his staff, led by Lang's probable mistress (Kim Cattrall). Proving that a political campaign is war by other means, they form a phalanx around Lang's achievements and vulnerabilities; their job is not to help the Ghost but to contain and confound him. His adversaries include not just people but machines. The movie begins with an empty car on the Martha's Vineyard ferry - its driver vanished, and soon found dead - and ends with another car-related death. In the two intervening...
...details. In that sense, The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth. Alexandre Desplat's violins saw away, in approved Bernard Herrmann fashion, as appliers and absorbers of dramatic shocks; and McGregor brings all his charm and intelligence to the vague figure of a Hitchcock hero who slips...