DIRECTED BY: Martin Scorsese
FEATURING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams
PLOT: A U.S. Marshall with a tragic past investigates a mysterious disappearance at an asylum for the criminally insane on a craggy, isolated Massachusetts island in the 1950s.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Scorsese sprinkles a few flakes of weirdness into his mainstream thriller for flavor, but it’s carefully tailored for the mild tastes of the masses.
COMMENTS: Atmosphere and suspense rule as Scorsese leaves film’s mainland to investigate the genre islands. With a horror movie aesthetic, a film noir hero and a brainteaser mystery plot, Shutter Island is a mini-history of popular movie mechanics, with some psychology and dark drama thrown in to provide a sense of gravitas. It’s no masterpiece, but it does effectively draw you into its mysterious labyrinth for two hours. Overwrought in the best way, this is the type of movie where portentous strings keep coming at the viewer like driving sheets of rain in a hurricane, key scenes take place in darkened cells filled with the criminally insane or in ruined cemeteries, and Nazis, lobotomizing surgeons, and drug-induced hallucinations all play a part in the paranoid plot.
DiCaprio puts in a fine performance as Teddy Daniels, a tough guy whose callous exterior may just be scar tissue from the wounds he’s suffered in a tough life. A war veteran who was present at the liberation of the Dachau death camps, Daniels may have committed acts that still haunt him; returning home, he turns to booze and then quickly suffers further tragedy when he loses his young wife to violence. Guilt, regret and lust for revenge haunt our hero, and impede his investigation of the murderess who’s disappeared from her locked cell as surely as does administrator Ben Kingsley’s odd reluctance to hand over patient medical files to the two federal marshals.
Scorsese plumbs DiCaprio’s psyche for spooky dream sequences, such as one where he embraces his dead wife while ash falls around them like snow; as the scene progresses her back turns into a burning cinder, while a cascade of blood simultaneously soaks the front of her dress. As the flick progresses, reality becomes plastic and the seeming illogic of the plot increases; DiCaprio’s flashbacks and dreams take up a larger portion of the action and sometimes bleed into the real world. Despite a mounting sense of weirdness, though, all is resolved rationally at the end.
You may guess the final twist, or you may not. The true test of a mystery/thriller is not whether the twist ending surprises you. It’s a bonus if it does and will make the movie a classic, but there are only so many unthought-of tricks that a director can deploy without cheating, and our capacity to be caught off-guard depends more on cinematic inexperience than anything else. The true virtue of a thriller is not to fool us but to put us inside the endangered shoes of the protagonist, and fill us with doubts as to our own safety, understanding, even sanity. When this movie’s clicking, the suspense is high and the Gothic atmosphere is thick and beautiful, making it well worth the short ferry ride out to Shutter Island.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com (contemporaneous)
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