MAX VON SYDOW: THE GREATEST EMIGRANT ACTOR

I've written an appreciation of Max von Sydow. It started as just a brief mention about how important the watching of Ingmar Bergman films (and a large handful of other foreign directors) was to anyone serious about movies when I first came to them, then kept growing as I remembered just how varied and marvelous his career was, both in Europe and Hollywood. It's up at Medium, you can link to it here and bypass the pay wall....

SOLOMON KANE: THE FILM

It also took me a while to catch up to Solomon Kane, Michael J Bassett's adaptation of Robert E Howard's Puritan swordsman, who was the most ambiguous of Howard's pulp heroes, a sort of 17th century version of The Shadow, and for that reason always my favourite. With that sort of foundation, it was amazing no one got to the character more quickly, and though I'd like to say it was worth the wait, the Shadow comparison is an apt one. Although Bassett gets much about the character right, he is more concerned with creating an origin story, and his Kane has an origin much like the Shadow in the Alec Baldwin film, an evil doer on a massive sadistic scale, who is somehow reformed.

Sadlt, this doesn't really work. The key conflict for Kane is between the sober restrictions of his Puritanism and the unsheathed evil which he encounters; his Kane may well be a sinner but he is also in the spell of this simple version of Christianity freed of paganesque ritual. Howard would contrast this with the unspeakable evils hidden in the dark continent, making a Kane a Kurtz in pulp clothing (see the cover of the Centaur Press reprint of Kane, the version I first read, left).

In this film, Kane, having been sworn off the rape and pillage we see at the film's start by an encounter with a devil who wants him for his own, is hiding out, as it were in a monastery, trying to find himself and lose himself from the devil. He encounters Puritans after he leaves, though the devotion of Pete Postlethwaite and family to the actual tenets of their faith seems somewhat tenuous. Drawn into the fight by the Raiders who massacre the family and kidnap the beautiful daughter, he follows them to his own family's ancetsral castle, where the ultimate confrontation with the masked warrior (hiding an identity obvious almost from the start) and his master, who can call upon great powers of CGI which somehow seem sub-Harryhausen in their awesome power.

Within this simple and predictable format James Purefoy is pretty good, if a little too muscular, as Kane: his inner demons are always externalised, more like Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing than Howard's Kane, though you can see the parallels between Howard's Kane and Stoker's Van Helsing quite clearly. Postlethwaite is excellent in his role, and Max VonSydow has a brilliant couple of cameos as Kane's father, and there is one brilliant scene in which Mackenzie Crook plays a priest gone mad and serving up sacrificial victims for ghouls hidden under the floor of his church. There are some other nice touches: the laying of hands by the evil Leatherface, the demons captured behind mirrors, and even the setting and the everyday people who inhabit it; Dan Lautsen's photography moves equally well between the grimness of the 17th century setting and the gruesomeness of the supernatural.

Sadly, Rachel Hurd-Wood is a boring heroine, who gets her final screams as the CGI monster appears with no purpose except to claim Kane and drain all the drama which has been built previously and make it redundant, kind of like the car crashes in a John Landis movie. Alice Krige, as her mother, deserved a bigger part. But the real cut and thrust of the picture seems to be setting up a sequel, where she is dumped and Kane and his few sidekicks get to go off searching for more devils. I suspect that one may be closer to the real thing, but this was entertaining enough in its generic way.

SHUTTER ISLAND: THE FILM

The big problem with adapting to film any story which withholds crucial information as a key device is maintaining the secret, the illusion which drives the story's twist. It can be desperately hard to do; think of Angel Heart as a prime example. In Shutter Island, to which I've finally caught up, the deftness with which Martin Scorsese illuminates the depths of Teddy Daniels' psyche merely serves to reveal, alarmingly early, what is going on, that the threats he (and more importantly we, the audience) experiences are internal.

At times, Scorsese, who seems to draw on any number of cinematic references throughout the film, almost restages Marat/Sade, which may, in the end be the best reference for this version of Dennis Lehane's much more low-key novel. Robert Richardson's camera moves with the kind of fluidity you expect in Scorsese, drawing out the shadows and the horror-movie iconography as if charting the actual inside of Daniels' damaged mind (think of Roger Corman's House Of Usher). It's probably no coincidence that Scorsese produced a 2007 documentary about Val Lewton's RKO horror pictures, which depend more on mood and psychological drama than actual physical schocks. And of course there's more than little Alfred Hitchcock here; although Robbie Robertson's score is composed of found music, much of it 20th century classical, it is often amplified to almost hysterical levels, in a way that recalls, as I'm sure it was meant to, Bernard Herrmann working for Hitchcock.

Scorsese remains faithful to Lehane's novel, but is able visually to draw out the business of Daniels' having bee with the soldiers who liberated Dachau. But there's a strange disconnect, between the horror of the Holocaust, the fear of nuclear destruction (classic 1950s sf paranoia) Jackie Earle Haley rants about, and the actual killings that form the heart of Daniels' personal tragedy. I found myself constantly trying to fit the jigsaw pieces of trauma together (and Max Von Sydow, as the almost cliched Nazi scientist has a small lecture of trauma and dream, which would be where even the slowest member of the audience would finally pick up the hints) but failing.

Von Sydow relishes his role, but the film is stolen in some ways by Mark Ruffalo, who seems to physically transform himself depending on which role he is playing to Teddy, and by some of the players in smaller parts, notably Ted Levine, as the warden, and Patricia Clarkson, as one of the two versions of Rachel, the disappeared patient Teddy has come to the island's hospital for the criminally insane to find. It's awkward that Ben Kingsley is always doing exposition and trying to look nervous, and that John Carroll Lynch as the deputy warden appears to channelling Danny Aiello. Rachel Williams is sometimes badly judged as his dead wife; Teddy's description of her is far more chilling than any attitude she can muster. But the other difficulty is Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to have brought along his bad faux-Bahstan accent from The Departed to play the same character he played in Revolutionary Road, with the same problem of believablity as a grizzled 1950s WWII veteran. He just doesn't have the matter-of-fact gravitas you'd expect from the era; more Tony Curtis than Richard Conte.

Scorsese, although this is DiCaprio's film, taking place within Teddy's head, never actually lingers there too long. In the end, that's why the movie works well as it does, because he's taken the Brian DePalma-like decision to make us the character, and let us experience what's happening to Teddy, and try to make sense of it. That we can figure it out, and still not make sense, still feel caught up by the swirling morass of his sanity, is a tribute to his immense skill as a film-maker.

Shutter Island (2009) directed by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis from the novel by Dennis Lehane