I’ve never actually gone crazy - at least, not clinically. But Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island might be the closest I’ve come to a brush with insanity.Scorsese’s 21st film - the latest in a long and impeccably significant history - isn’t a typical filmic descent into madness. It’s more like being thrown into the deep end of a freezing cold swimming pool, equally disorienting and inescapably gripping.
After a months-long delay in the theatrical release (a real tragedy for the film’s Oscar chances), audiences have seen the trailers for Shutter Island and so are already familiar with the basic premise: Mentally unhinged U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) goes in search of an escaped convict/patient at an island-based mental institution off the coast of Boston. While searching Ashecliffe Hospital with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), Teddy finds himself combating a hurricane and a subversive institutional staff (led by Sir Ben Kingsley).
The real narrative, though, takes place within Teddy’s mind, as headaches and delusions begin to muddle his investigation. The line between reality and delirium becomes blurred, and it’s here that DiCaprio gets a chance to shine; indeed, this might be DiCaprio’s top performance, even besting his last outing with Scorsese in 2006’s The Departed.
Surrounded by an omnipresent cloud of smoke pluming from his pipe, Kingsley almost steals the show with his turn as the shady Dr. Cawley, continually dodging questions and requests for help in favor of his own personal agenda. And just wait until that agenda is revealed, because it’s one of the most alarming twists in recent American film history - which, I suppose, owes as much to the Dennis Lehane book on which the film is based as it does to Scorsese’s penchant for last-reel shockers.
But the true star here is Scorsese himself. No, he doesn’t appear on screen as he has in previous films (his taxicab confession is arguably the spookiest part of Taxi Driver), but what Scorsese does from behind the camera is masterful. From the opening moments of the film, Scorsese puts the viewer on edge, forcing us to orient ourselves first on a buoyant ferry and then en route to a high-security zone of an island so eerie we expect Matthew Fox to come running out of the treeline at any second.
Sorry, Lost fans: There’s no time-skipping or black smoke monsters on this island, but there is a pervading sense of imminent danger from the environment and its inhabitants, an unsettling air of mystery keeping the plot’s solution just out of reach. As Scorsese reveals Teddy’s past in a curious blend of flashback and hallucination, we get to see a master at work; Scorsese is like an expert puppeteer who knows exactly how to manipulate what he wants us to see.
A prime example of Scorsese’s skill as a filmmaker comes when Teddy and Chuck find their way into Ward C of Ashecliffe Hospital, the building in which the most dangerous patients are housed. At once claustrophobic and nerve-racking in an “I know the killer is just around the corner” kind of way, Scorsese’s direction puts the audience on edge until Teddy, relieved, escapes Ward C with his life and a fistful of questions - a literal fistful, in the case of a hospital document that becomes central to the film’s climax.
What filmgoers will be discussing most when the credits roll is exactly the film’s climax and its falling action, but to treat Shutter Island as if it were a puzzle film on the order of Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Memento might be to do a disservice to the movie Scorsese has crafted. The psychological thriller isn’t exactly Scorsese’s trademark - he’s more at home with violent stories about the conflict between family and duty - but many other reviewers are already noting a serious debt to the canon of Alfred Hitchcock. As thrillers go, Shutter Island is certainly up there with Hitch’s Psycho and Rear Window.
Just try not to go crazy watching it.
Like every Scorsese movie, Shutter Island gets an "R for disturbing violent content, language and some nudity." There's some blood, as well as disturbing flashbacks with Holocaust overtones and a graphic suicide. A few F-bombs (also standard Scorsese fare) and a brief glimpse at naked prisoners pepper the flick.
