Shooting the Past (1999)

Tim Spall. Is there an actor working today who's as dependably wonderful?

Directed by Stephen Poliakoff
Written by Stephen Poliakoff
Starring Lindsay Duncan, Timothy Spall, Liam Cunningham, Billie Whitelaw, Emilia Fox



Well, this is a little different.  I'm doing something for the first time, something that I might perhaps never do again - or which, at most, I'll only be doing very, very sparingly.  I think.  We'll see.  I mean, I can't really rely on myself to do what I want, but... so far as I can tell, writing about television will be a rare event, or less frequent than that.

But then, why not write about television?  Every picture here that I've rambled in the broad vicinity of was watched via a DVD, on a screen at home.  So was Shooting the Past.  And it's a three-hour miniseries (shorter than Apocalypse Now Redux, and far less flabby), not something that ran for weeks and months.  Neither of these, however, are the reason why I decided to sit down and write about something made entirely for TV.

Nope, it's all down to Stephen Poliakoff.  See, Poliakoff has made films for the cinema - not that they've been terribly successful, well-received or, um, good - but at some point in the mid-90s, he decided that television was the medium he wanted to work in.  Given the thoroughly unexceptional nature of his ventures into theatrical releases, that's probably not a bad idea (although, to be fair, those movies were right at the beginning of his career, so we should let him off).  But it's also not a bad idea - a very good idea, indeed - because few filmmakers today have quite the same gift for televised drama as Poliakoff.  His films - or plays, perhaps, I think it's entirely reasonable to call them plays, and that word probably suits better than films in most cases, certainly better than movies - his plays have become something to look forward to, a regular joy from a unique talent.  If Poliakoff recognises that he can create his best work in television, I think it would be rather churlish for me to turn my nose up at it.

Shooting the Past is the film/play that first established his name in the medium*, and still stands as arguably his finest work.  A beautifully paced and constructed homage to memory and the huge breadth of human experience, given emotion by a superb cast, Poliakoff offers us an image of just how much we stand to lose - and how little we're often aware of it - when we unthinkingly choose the modern over the past.  Progress and change are important, yet so frequently we let the brightness and energy of the dawn take all of our attention, so easily we lose our grip on what we had before.  And that's something which, once lost, can never be recovered; when we all forget, the past dies, scattered on the winds, forever out of our reach.




*before the brief venture into cinema, Poliakoff had a successful career writing and directing for the stage.

Shutter Island (2010)

Shutter Island looks good - pity about the screenplay.

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Laeta Kalogridis, Dennis Lehane (novel)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow



At what point does the big twist of a film become sufficiently well-known to be talked about in public?  I know that I've not exactly been slow to throw in the odd spoiler - for which I would apologise but, well, I'm not going to, it's your fault if you've not seen the film before - but there's a difference between letting slip a detail of how the film progresses and giving away the big reveal.  After all, the whole point of a twist in the classic sense is that you, the viewer, are encouraged to believe one thing throughout the film before discovering, often (though not always) in the picture's final moments, that you were wrong all along, that what you've learnt needs to be reinterpreted and put together again in light of the revelation.

If the twist is given away in advance, then there's not going to be a wrong interpretation to correct later, and the reveal won't mean anything.  The film has built up to a moment of Oh! Now it all makes sense!, and that moment's lost if you know what's coming from the start.  The magic of the great climactic discovery - who Keyser Sözé* is, what Rosebud means, what's the connection between Bruce Willis and the little boy, what's inside Jaye Davidson's pants - depends entirely on being a surprise; there's no magic if you can see up the conjuror's sleeve.

Unfortunately, in Shutter Island, the conjuror's sleeves are rather baggy to begin with - you don't really need to be told what's hidden up there to know just what's going to come out.  It probably doesn't help that the twist is somewhat similar to that of a very well-known picture (with elements of few others) that I shan't name, but frankly, even if you'd never heard of the precedent, I'd be surprised if you couldn't tell what was going to emerge at the end of this film.  I don't want to spoil it for you, but that thing you'll be thinking halfway through the film, yes, it's that.

All of which is a bit disappointing.  It goes without saying that Scorsese is a magnificent director, not to mention a great student of the cinema - which probably explains why the look of this movie reminded me so much of The Shining.  Scorsese being Scorsese, that probably wasn't an accident.  Indeed, it shouldn't be:  The Shining looked superb, full of tension and foreboding, and Shutter Island doesn't fail in that respect, bleak, taut, confusing, intimidating.  And by and large, it has a fine cast - although I have to confess to a long-term lack of respect for DiCaprio.  Not enough to discourage me all too much - and I loved Inception - but enough to make me think that it really should have been someone else.  Personally, I blame Richard Herring, for firmly fixing into my mind the notion that DiCaprio's face is too small for his giant sprout head (it's probably on youtube somewhere).  Anyway, aside from DiCaprio and his small face, what was I going on about?

A film that's really not that interesting.  Hence the diversion.  Great director, fine cast, and a dull, unimaginative screenplay with lumpen dialogue and a good few pages more than it ought to have had.  Movies being too long has always been a bugbear of mine - since longer films stopped meaning markedly higher costs for the studios, the art of cutting unnecessary time has been largely lost - and it's disappointing to say that a picture is lengthier than it ought to be when it's only a little over two hours.  But Shutter Island drags throughout much of the film, it repeats itself, it pulls out scenes longer than they need to be.  It's flabby.  Although, to be honest, a good trim wouldn't solve all the problems, wouldn't improve the rather obvious twist.  It's not a bad film, but if you want to see something by Scorsese, he's done so much that is an awful lot better than this.




*I have no idea how to spell this.  It's never written down in the film, and doesn't appear in the credits for obvious reasons.  It's bloody annoying.  He should have been called Keith Smith.