by Brandon Nowalk
Thriller, Thriller Night: Shutter Island & The Ghost Writer
Early spring tends to be the dumping ground for movie studios; a graveyard of horror and weak-tea dramas held back by the winter awards bait. But not all thrillers are empty calories, and this season brings us two smart, strikingly similar Hitchcock throwbacks with topical commentary galore: Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer.
Shutter Island
Through a haze off stormy Massachusetts, a ferry approaches and US Marshal Teddy Daniels is preparing to solve the mystery of the only escaped patient from the experimental asylum on Shutter Island. He proves himself a smart investigator almost immediately. But anyone’s wits could desert them on a secluded island in the midst of a storm with only the incarcerated and mad for company. And what’s with those recurring flashbacks, haunting Daniels like a ghost with unfinished business?
Scorsese is one of cinema’s most knowledgeable critics, and it’s a pleasure to see how he pays homage to his influences, including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and especially Alfred Hitchcock (with riffs on everything from Notorious to North by Northwest). But his use of rear projection, bombastic score, ticking clocks, and the like are not throwaway references for the observant film-lover. Scorsese’s genius is in layering his film with clues from other films, lending Shutter Island an even deeper level of a mental puzzle. A notable early scene includes close-ups of Greek statues, like the silent gods from the marital drama Contempt. You’ll understand why by the end.
The other thing that sets Shutter Island apart from your everyday February thriller is that it has meaning apart from a labyrinthine plot. Psychological mysteries are about how man copes, and Shutter Island is specifically about coping with violence—from the bloodlust of war to the tragedy of murder, the fears of WMD to good old Freudian penis anxiety. It’s also a fierce argument for psychological care over prison abandonment, and Ben Kingsley’s performance as the administrative physician is as viscerally affecting as the final surprise. Nazis, murderous mothers, arsonists—they’re all human, Scorsese argues. Even the most fractured mind deserves help.
The Ghost Writer
Through the haze off stormy Massachusetts a ferry approaches and an empty car portends the death of its owner, the original ghost writer for former British Prime Minister Adam Lang. Cue Ewan McGregor, who plays the new ghost and quickly winds up tangled in a web of relationships and lies when mysterious scandal breaks out. And there’s still that suspicious death of the original ghost writer.
It’s no accident that the film has the premise of Hitchcock’s Rebecca; only instead of a new wife coming to stay at a secluded beach-side mansion, it’s a replacement staffer. Like Scorsese, Polanski has applied the lessons of Hitchcock, quickly escalating the various plot threads, every scene feeling inevitable, until one final, momentous night. But Polanski is not as classical or nostalgic a filmmaker as Scorsese, and his stamp of Kafkaesque expressionism is all over the picture, pitting his hero against a sea of scowls, odd characters, and an inescapable sense of paranoia. He also imbues the Ghost Writer with his trademark themes, including the roles and power of women, expressions of dominance, and, as you may guess by the title, identity. The plot is an obvious look at how to reconcile our actions with the stories we tell ourselves. It’s an engaging thriller with a gut-punch ending and with uniformly stellar performances, including Pierce Brosnan as Lang, Olivia Williams as his wife, and the always welcome Tom Wilkinson.
Roman Polanski is a celebrity these days, less for his brilliant and complicated studies of gender and power dynamics (notably in his late ‘60s pictures, Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, and Rosemary’s Baby) and more for his tabloid attention. You’d be forgiven for seeing the Ghost Writer as a comment on his criminal status, as the film is in part a demand for accountability and an assertion that some crimes have no statute of limitations, like his 1994 thriller Death and the Maiden. But the Ghost Writer is primarily an attack on Britain’s role as the US lap dog during Tony Blair’s administration and a heartfelt cry for war crimes investigation. For all the political twists, the only part that rings false (and I wager Polanski would agree) is that anyone in power would have the fortitude to call out torture by name.