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.

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

Cast: Michelle Williams, Wally Dalton, Will Patton, John Robinson, Ayanna Berkshire, Larry Fessenden. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt, based on a story by Jonathan Raymond. Cinematography: Sam Levy. Production design: Ryan Warren Smith. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Smokey Hormel, Will Oldham.

"People who can't afford dog food shouldn't have dogs," says the store clerk who has just nabbed Wendy for shoplifting a can of dog food for Lucy, who is tied up outside the store. The clerk is an insufferable young ass, sucking up to his boss, who from the look on his face is somewhat inclined to let Wendy pay for the dog food and go. But under the assault of smarmy platitudes from the clerk, he calls the police instead. Hours later, Wendy is set free and returns to the store to find Lucy gone. And so the central plot of the film, which recalls the search for the stolen bike in Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), is set in motion. But to go back to the store clerk's remark, it's worth considering at face value: Lucy is in fact a luxury for someone as impoverished as Wendy, whose devotion to the dog complicates an already desperate existence. Lucy is by no means as essential to Wendy's survival as the bicycle is to Antonio's in the De Sica classic. Wendy is a dreamer, who thinks that she'll find gainful work in Alaska, and has set out from Indiana in her aging Honda Accord, with only a few hundred dollars, some meager possessions, and her beloved Lucy. But when the Honda breaks down in Oregon (the city is unnamed but the film was made in Portland), achieving that dream becomes infinitely more difficult. At the end, Wendy has neither car nor dog, but she persists, hopping a freight that may take her to her dream destination -- or not. It's a fable of hope and folly that leaves us to ponder the unknown, which is this small film's great strength. Like Bicycle Thieves, it makes a social comment about the need for safety nets and about the Catch-22s that plague the lives of the poor. The security guard who befriends Wendy, an old man who works 8-to-8 standing outside a strip mall to keep people from sleeping in their cars in the parking lot, observes that you can't get a job without an address, and you can't get an address without a job that allows you to pay for an address. But mostly it's a story about how dreams keep people going while also forcing them to pay the price for dreaming and not succumbing to despair. Michelle Williams is, as always, a marvel, a chameleon actress who seemingly can play anything.

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Cast: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Tommy Nelson, Rod Rondeaux. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond. Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt. Production design: David Doernberg. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Jeff Grace.

Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff leaves its viewers in the dark in more ways than one. The night scenes are illuminated only by what would have been available to the members of the wagon train making its slow way west: lanterns, firelight, and moonlight. And in the end, we are not allowed conventional movie closure: the survival or demise of the characters, or even whether they made the choice to follow the lead of Meek or of the Indian who has been pressed into service as a guide. Reichardt has flouted so many conventions of the genre that, depending on your willingness to take the film on its own terms, it can be (and has been) described as either gripping or frustrating. She eschews the tendency to turn the American West into a panorama of wide open spaces, instead cramming everything into the old-fashioned Academy ratio for screen framing. She undercuts heroism by never letting us know whether the ostensible hero of the film, Michelle Williams's Emily Tetherow, is right or wrong in her decision to defend the Indian guide against the racist Meek (Bruce Greenwood, hidden behind lots of hair and beard). What we have most of in the film is a sense of being lost, not only physically, in the desert wilds of the far West, but also spiritually, of being cut off from the God the devout members implore so fervently. The isolation is terrifying, especially when the one person who knows the land in which they're wandering doesn't speak their language. We are betrayed by our hope for conventional movie resolutions, and that only makes us feel cut off too.

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest. Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Robert Frazen. Music: Jon Brion.