SHUTTER ISLAND
***
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is not a horror movie, though its misleading trailers would have you believe it is. While there are some effectively spooky sequences and a chilling atmosphere of dread to the surroundings, the film was no doubt a difficult film to market without suggesting something far more thrilling and terrifying than what it is - a Wicker Man-esque stranger-in-a-strange-land mystery, a psychological thriller with ghost story surroundings. Having said that, Shutter Island is a mesmerizing, atmospheric, and expertly crafted suspense film, boasting the fine performances, editing, and cinematography one has come to expect from a Scorsese picture, and enough head-scratcher twists to keep one guessing until the film’s satisfying climax.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshall sent alongside partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) to an asylum for the criminally insane located on inescapable Shutter Island, where an inmate who’d murdered her children has inexplicable vanished. Teddy almost instantly begins to suspect that the staff (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow are at their terrific best) and the patients may know more than they are letting on, and sets out to unravel the truth behind the woman’s disappearance, as well as the nature of the asylum itself. Simultaneously, Teddy suffers vivid dreams and hallucinations, lush with surreal terror under cinematographer Robert Richardson’s legendary eye, and he shares with Chuck some nightmares of his own. As Teddy’s suspicions rise, he uncovers many strange clues and engages in one increasingly cryptic conversation after another, all seeming to lead to the mysterious lighthouse at the edge of the island.
There are touches of William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration in this yarn, and again, quite a lot of The Wicker Man as Teddy tries to figure out if indeed the entire population of the island is in on some sinister plan. Among those who Teddy encounters as he tries to put the pieces together are a great cast of character actors including Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley, and Ted Levine, all excellent in their scenes of enigmatic behavior and cryptic dialogue. The answers are provided by film’s end - true to form, Scorsese neither cheats nor disappoints, tying all loose ends together in a climactic scene that sheds light on all that has come before, down to the smallest once-baffling details. The destination itself may not be enough to warrant the trip for some, but one cannot argue that, for a film large on confusion and disorientation, there are no mysteries left by the last frame.
Scorsese seems to have developed the freedom to have a little fun with his films - well-made as it may be, there is a lot about Shutter Island that suggests a director knowingly at play, from the overwrought score to some of the film’s more extreme visuals, like a sea of rats unleashed on a jagged cliff (perhaps a slap in the face to those who criticized the infamous rat of his last film…). There doesn’t seem to be any attempt to hold Shutter Island up alongside his Taxi Driver and Raging Bull days - Teddy’s journey is expertly told, but the film never tries to suggest it’s more than what it is. An examination on grief, psychopathy, and everything in between, Shutter Island is one of those films that may make for a better experience than a narrative, plot-driven story, but under Scorsese’s masterful direction and DiCaprio’s emotional performance, it really is a powerful trip - so long as you don’t go in looking for a horror film.
- Logan Crow
February 21, 2010
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