A PROPHET
Sometimes I wonder if critics around a movie just because they can--as a ritualistic display of artier-than-thou snootiness. It was the case with last years meandering A Christmas Tale and to a greater degree with this years brutal slog of a gangster film called A Prophet. Told in short, shaky-cam vignettes, mostly urgently whispered two-person conversations punctuated by bursts of ugly violence, the film relays the story of Malik (Tahar Rahim), a young Arab prisoner who, through sheer opportunistic chutzpah, manages to climb to the top of the Corsican crime scene despite rarely leaving his cell. It's a damn good plot, and as Malik orchestrates his rise, director Jacques Audiard makes sure to include plenty of dime-a-dozen crime movie details-the bullet-riddled bodies, the cheap hookers, the copious drug use-but leaves out what makes sinful sagas like Goodfellas and The Godfather great-humanity. We don't like Malik, which is okay. We didn't like Daniel Plainview. We damn sure didn't like Anton Chigurh. But those antiheroes were people-human beings who, despite their string of sadistic acts, paused for intriguing moments of pity, self-examination, even regret. No such attempt is made to make Malik into a three-dimensional human. He's simply a blank-faced bad boy who does bad things with no remorse, and in return receives good things, none of which produce any sort of reaction from him either. Critics have hailed Audiard's decision to make Malik an "enigma"-I say the director's decision to rob his lead of any personality renders his film inert and, yes, endless. There is one saving grace here-Niels Arestrup. As one of the many crime kingpins Malik knocks down on his way to the top, Arestrup's voice is filled with gravelly authority, his eyes alight with the impassioned dignity of a wounded animal. But even his presence works against the film-I kept thinking how I'd much rather see a movie about this man. I can't fault Audiard and co. for their ambition, but I think if they'd tried a tad less harder to make a modern masterpiece, they just might've churned one out. C-.
SHUTTER ISLAND
Scorsese's gone all Kubrick on us. The moody spirit of the late Shining director hangs like a foreboding raincloud overShutter Island, an enjoyably preposterous, impressively directed piece of slow-build paranoia-mongering that's more white-knuckle fun than a film set in an insane asylum has any right to be. You've seen the previews, you know the plot-Leo Dicaprio and Mark Ruffalo are Boston marshals (sorry, "mahshals"), sent to the titular institution-a treatment center for the criminally insane-to hunt for a missing patient. That's the Twitter-friendly version. Our heroes soon get caught up in a complicated web of conspiracy theories involving concentration camps, lobotomies, hallucinogens, and the very nature of the human mind. Yeah, yeah, the far-flung story's like something out of a 1950's shlock pic, but thanks to Scorsese, it transcends its campy roots. He's firing on all cylinders here, using every trick in the filmmaking book-playing with time and space, color and focus, light and sound-to set our blood racing. He's always understood better than anyone else how the movies move-how to take the rhythm of the soundtrack and the movement of the camera and synchronize them for the desired effect. Thanks to the indefatigable, highly skilled man at the helm of this flick, Shutter Island comes off as a series of thoroughly enjoyable suspense setpieces. At the center of it all is DiCaprio, whose presence elevates the film from merely "good" to "very good". This is the kind of work Oscars are made for. The performance is stunning in its emotional nakedness; not since Chinatown has it been such a pleasure watching a tight-wound character come gloriously, messily undone on screen. But even DiCaprio can't rescue the film from its third-act, which, sinks under the weight of far too much telling and very little showing, as well as a tacked-on, "deep" coda that wasn't needed to begin with. Still, to see a genius like Scorsese at the height of his considerable powers is a helluva springtime treat-even if its only for 2/3rds of the picture. B+
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