| Who's In It: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas The Basics: Shutter Island, the real estate property, features spooky trees, ominous buildings, a creepy mental hospital for the criminally insane, angry-god weather, rat-filled caves and gruesome hallucinations. The freezing, leaking mausoleum on the island's Cemetery of Anguished Doom may, in fact, be the happiest place there. So why is Federal Marshall Leonardo DiCaprio so insistent on staying and uncovering the truth about a missing inmate? And why is she missing? And who is she really? And what's with the cryptic notes he finds? And the freaky lady with no hair? And the little dead girl? You get no answers from this review. I only spoil the ones I hate. PS. Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner hook up at the end of Valentine's Day. What's The Deal: They used to call films like this "B-movies" because they were cheaply made and were about haunted houses. And now the B-movies have Grade-A budgets and huge stars and fancy directors like Martin Scorsese, which means that the filmmaking becomes more important than the subject matter. If you wanted to, you could take the film's post-war shellshock, horror-hospital setting and tense, mind-scrambling paranoia about government conspiracies as commentary on How We Live Now. But I think it's sort of just about the haunted house. And that's okay ... |
