Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas. Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker.

Shutter Island is two hours and 18 minutes long, and it feels like it. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) is almost as long (two minutes shorter) and it doesn't. Yet Martin Scorsese, who made Shutter Island, is one of the few contemporary directors who are spoken of with much the same reverence as Hitchcock. Granted, comparing the two films is unfair: North by Northwest is meant to be giddy fun, constantly on the move, while Shutter Island is a psychological thriller with horror movie overtones and a claustrophobic setting. So perhaps the more appropriate comparison would be one of Hitchcock's explorations of disordered psychology, Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958). The former comes in at 109 minutes, the latter at just a few minutes over two hours. The point here is that Hitchcock knew how to tighten things up. Scorsese may know how, but he doesn't seem to care. He lets Shutter Island slop around, losing tension and focus in the process, when all he really has to do is guide us to a surprise twist and shocking climax. I seem to be one of the few who feel that the film is a tedious indulgence in material of no great matter: Its psychology is unconvincing, its characters are toys, and its payoff is rather pat and formulaic. Still, it gets a whopping 8.2 rating from viewers on IMdB, so I seem to be among the few who feel that too much acting and directing talent has been expended on too little.

Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2019)

Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2019)

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Paul Rudd, Karen Gillan, Josh Brolin. Screenplay: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely. Cinematography: Trent Opaloch. Production design: Charles Wood. Film editing: Jeffrey Ford, Matthew Schmidt. Music: Alan Silvestri.

Back in September, I had this to say about Aquaman (James Wan, 2018):

"I sometimes feel with the comic-book-sourced superhero movie that we have moved not just into a separate genre but into an entirely separate medium: a fusion of video games, technology, and neo-mythology that's something other than traditional cinematic storytelling."

A few weeks later, Martin Scorsese said much the same thing:

“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema,” Scorsese told Empire magazine. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

I bring this up not to express some sort of solidarity with Scorsese, or to try to boast that I said it first, especially since Scorsese's remarks have been bouncing around the internet ever after. It should be pretty apparent from the films that I write about in this blog that my interests are centered largely in "the cinema of human beings," in Scorsese's phrase. But I think, too, that there's a place for movies like the ones Scorsese seems to be excluding from the canon of cinema. And I bring this up because last night I was faced with a choice: I could watch Scorsese's The Irishman on Netflix, or Avengers: Endgame on Disney+, to which a family member subscribes and had given me her password. 

I chose Avengers: Endgame because I was tired and full of Thanksgiving dinner, and I wanted to give Scorsese's movie my full attention. I also knew that there would be no surprises in the movie I chose to watch instead: There would be familiar characters, some jokes, some emotional moments, and lots and lots of action. I would not have to think, to puzzle out motives, to try to place the film in the canon of its auteur. 

And I was happy with my choice. I was entertained by actors doing fine work in their métier, with bright and colorful action, with a few sci-fi conundrums about time travel. I enjoyed seeing characters from other Marvel movies come together in new combinations. I was pleased with the richness of the casting -- dazzled, in short, by so many handsome stars. I turned off the movie relaxed and satisfied. 

Will I think about Avengers: Endgame and want to see it again? Probably not. Certainly not in the way I will think about and perhaps rewatch Carlos Reygadas's Japón, Hirokazu Koreeda's The Third Murder, Julián Hernández's Raging Sun, Raging Sky, or even Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm, to name some of the works from the "cinema of human beings" I've seen and written about recently. But that doesn't mean that blockbuster movies, the ones that cost and make millions of dollars and are seen by millions of people around the world, are unworthy of my attention. It's just that they serve a different need, they speak to a different part of the soul. 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Joel Barish: Jim Carrey
Clementine Kruczynski: Kate Winslet
Patrick: Elijah Wood
Stan: Mark Ruffalo
Mary: Kirsten Dunst
Dr. Mierzwiak: Tom Wilkinson

Director: Michel Gondry
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth
Cinematography: Ellen Kuras
Production design: Dan Leigh
Film editing: Valdís Óskarsdóttir
Music: Jon Brion

I have a sneaky feeling that there's less to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind than meets the eye. That it is nothing more than a romantic drama tricked out with intricate storytelling devices like misleading cuts and deceptive flashbacks and an overlay of sci-fi. The story of the affair of two misfits, the morose Joel Barish and the eccentric Clementine Kruczynski, has been told before. How far, for example, are Joel and Clementine from C.C. Baxter and Fran Kubelik in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960)? The course of true love never did run smooth, but Eternal Sunshine doubles down on that premise, putting Joel and Clementine through the bumpy paces twice, leaving us to ponder if Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, et al. are telling us that their mismatched couple were meant to be together no matter what. Did Joel and Clementine split prematurely, rushing into the radical solution of erasing themselves from each other's memories, when instead if they had stuck it out they could have resolved their differences less drastically? No matter, because Eternal Sunshine is so efficiently and originally accomplished that we can overlook the conventional situation that is masked by so much cleverness. It is certainly the peak of Jim Carrey's boom-or-bust career, Kate Winslet demonstrates once again how invaluable she is as an actress, and the supporting cast is made up of top-caliber actors. I suspect that the film owes more to the fertile imagination of Charlie Kaufman, who won an Oscar for it (along with Gondry and Pierre Bismuth), and film editor Valdís Oskarsdóttir than to Gondry's direction -- he has yet to make another film as impressive as this one.

Showtime

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

Considering that we spend half our waking lives at work, it's surprising that there are so few good films about what we do there. The problem may be that many, if not most, of the jobs we do lack the essential narrative shape: beginning, middle, and end. They're a routine repeating itself until death or retirement provides the closure. The exceptions would seem to be cops and doctors, who deal with life and death, and sometimes lawyers, if their jobs lead to the courtroom and aren't just an eternal drawing up of documents. But surprisingly, given the low esteem in which they're held by the general public, there are also some classic films about journalists at work; His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) come immediately to mind. (I omit Orson Welles's magnum opus because it seems to me less about journalism than about obsession.) I will have to add Spotlight to the list, though despite its best picture Oscar (or maybe because of it) I think it's too soon to call it a great film. What makes it work for me is that it's a convincing portrait of what I know about journalists: that the good ones love what they do. Take Mike Rezendes, for example, whom I got to know a bit at the Mercury News. He's a few inches shorter and quite a few pounds lighter than Mark Ruffalo, who plays him in the movie, but what Ruffalo gets right about Rezendes is his absolute delight in doing the job right, flinging himself body and soul into his work. I would also single out here the performance of Liev Schreiber, one of our best and most underappreciated actors, whose Marty Baron is a spot-on portrait of the journalist who has found himself promoted upstairs to where his commitment to the profession is regarded with suspicion, even though his heart is in the right place. Michael Keaton's Walter Robinson is one of those who suspect Baron, and I wish there had been more scenes in which the growing confidence each has in the other was dramatized. John Slattery's Ben Bradlee Jr. is a keen portrayal of the journalist whose edges have been worn down to the point where he's always in danger of playing it too safe. Now, this judgment of the film is being made by someone who knows the territory, but considering how many cop movies seem ludicrous to cops, and how doctors tend to despise medical dramas, I think it speaks well of writer-director Tom McCarthy and his co-screenwriter Josh Singer that they manage to capture the essence of the journalism game (at least as it was in 2001-03, before the demise of newspapers) so extraordinarily well.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015)

There are two distinct audiences for superhero comic book movies like The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) and this one, its sequel. One audience is just the casual fan of action movies. The other is the hardcore devotees of the comic books on which the movies are based. Pleasing one audience without losing the other is a hard trick to pull off. The hardcore audience knows the backstories of all the characters and is likely to be turned off by any inconsistencies with the source material. But the audience ignorant of the backstories needs some exposition to get them clued in to who these people are and what they're up to. Whedon is probably the person best qualified to deal with the problem, for one thing because he brings his own hardcore devotees along with him: the fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who trust Whedon to keep them entertained no matter how complicated and absurd the storyline becomes. I don't happen to be steeped in Marvel Comics lore myself, but I've watched every episode of Buffy at least once, so I appreciate Whedon's ability to take me along for an amusing ride. He does this by not taking anything in the Avengers movies terribly seriously. As in Buffy, what you have is a bunch of characters wisecracking through the apocalypse. And fortunately, the producers have enough money to spend not only on special effects but also on a huge cast of likable actors who relish the gags Whedon gives them and have the skill to play it all with the right blend of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek. In the end, the movie seems a little overloaded with stars -- in addition to Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, there are cameos by Idris Elba, Samuel L. Jackson, and Don Cheadle, as well as the luxury casting of James Spader as the voice of Ultron. Keeping all of them busy squeezes the action sequences into incoherence. That may be why Whedon confessed to feeling exhausted afterward and declined to write and direct the third film scheduled in the series.