“Believable character”

My best male students have been pestering me to go see Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island, a cop thriller with Leonard DiCaprio playing the lead role of U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels. Conveniently enough, the latest magazines to arrive at the house carried reviews of the film.

“This is a movie that requires audiences to care, and care deeply, about what’s happening in poor beleaguered Teddy Daniels’s brain,” Ross Douthat writes in National Review. “His psychological problems are the film, in a way—but Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t the man to make you believe in them, or him.”

In the Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz asserts the reverse. The Dennis Lehane novel upon which the film is based is so excessively long, he says, that “one’s ability to suspend disbelief is taken to the breaking point and beyond.” The movie version would be an utter flop “were it not for DiCaprio’s extraordinary performance, which (unlike the plot) only seems to get better the more you think about it.”

The coincidence of two critics reaching diametrically opposed conclusions in very nearly the same terms set me to thinking. Bill Vallicella, as I recalled, had also used the same terms. “A good novelist,” he proposed, “has the ability to set before the reader in concrete and memorable terms a believable character. . . .” Believability, on this showing, seems inseparable from whatever a good novelist is good at.

At all events, critics say this kind of thing all the time (“the character comes to life,” “the character just never seems real”), but only now do I realize that I have no idea what they mean. Podhoretz’s opinion is the most respectable, because it is attached to something outside his opinion: most people would agree that a 400-page thriller, written in “indifferent prose,” would be a strain on more than disbelief. But the conventional form of the critical plaudits and disapproval seems little more than the interjection of a mood.