Long Live The Kingsley
The mighty Ben Kingsley lends his incomparable talents to Martin Scorsese’s latest opus.
Tara Brady, 19 Mar 2010
Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel, Martin Scorsese’s deliriously pulpy Shutter Island takes place in 1954 on a Boston island compound that houses the criminally insane. It’s one creepy locale, and the director loads every shot with diseased references to Shock Corridor and just about every nightmarish Grand Guignol scenario ever committed to celluloid.
A classically spooky institutional horror, one might imagine that the cineaste director sat down with his sterling cast – Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams – to take in Chan Wook-Park or Sam Fuller movies. Instead he treated the gang to Titicut Follies, Frederick Wiseman’s coruscating 1967 about the treatment of inmates and patients at Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane.
“It wasn’t an indication of what the style or tone of our film should be,” Ben Kingsley tells me. “It was because it’s incomprehensible to us to grasp the fact that treatments still medieval until end of 20th century. Things hadn’t moved on much since 14th century. Marty always sat in on screenings and seemed as surprised as us at seeing the film. He sees it all as a teaching experience. Because he is so massively knowledgeable, his projection is that you are all as educated as he is.”
In the terrifically heightened movieverse, Ben Kingsley’s tremendously gothic performance – think Dr. Moreau on leave from Dachau - increasingly dwarfs the malevolent architecture of the setting as the film progresses to its demented climax.
Today, sitting down with the actor on the eve of Shutter Island’s London premiere – he’s neat as a pin and gentlemanly as ever - we’re a bit taken aback when the actor suggests that those subtle tonal shifts are mostly down to Marty.
“I’m delighted you think that,” he cries. “But all I had to worry about were my patients. The prism that he films through is shifting all the time and it therefore allowed me to exploit core character description. But I feared that if you share that explicitly with an audience you are showing off. Like those painters who write three pages on their work in awful English.”
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