Not really a big fan of Martin Scorcese. Let’s just get that out of the way right in the beginning. Raging Bull, slow and overrated. Goodfellas, painfully lame. Kundun, didn’t see it. Lately though, the man has been having a bit of a career resurgence, at least in my eyes. I found Gangs of New York to be a bit of a bloated mess, but a mess that contains fleeting moments of transcendent brilliance. The Departed was generally a really strong effort in my eyes, and certainly an entertaining watch (that damn rat aside). It was with this mindset, then, that I walked into Scorcese’s latest effort, Shutter Island.
The story, set in 1954, tells the tale of a veteran US Marshal, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his brand new partner, Mark Ruffalo, who are tasked with finding an escaped mental patient who disappeared from her cell in an institution on a remote island in Boston Harbor. From almost the beginning, the motives of the men who run the hospital are called into question, and we are meant to wonder if things are really what they seem. Perhaps they don’t actually want this woman found? Conflict is elevated between the marshals and the psychiatrists over the course of the investigation until eventually it seems that the institution’s inhabitants are more than just aloof and unforthcoming, they may be downright sinister and dangerous. At this point, the story goes from looking like a typical detective story to becoming something else entirely.
Early on the mystery unfolds much like a classic noir story should. The protagonists show up wearing fedoras and overcoats, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, a violent storm riding in on their coattails. They poke their noses around, asking questions that people don’t want answered. It doesn’t take long though, for curveballs to be thrown our way. Instead of the dark, shadow soaked aesthetic that you would expect, Scorcese hits us with a vivid, colorful, almost Lewis Carroll inspired fairy tale world. The scenery pops, presenting us with an almost more real than real reality. In lieu of obscuring things in shadow, Shutter Island flips the script by often obscuring it’s protagonist in blinding flashes of bright, white light. The very first image of the film is a boat carrying the protagonist emerging from a solid, white harbor fog and coming into our view. This engulfing whiteness is repeated prominently later on during a string of psychotropic hallucinations DiCaprio’s character has on an operating table. One begins to wonder if there is some sort of symbolism or message involved in such a blatant reversal of visual expectations. By the time DiCaprio’s character encounters the escaped patient in a subterranean cave, the flickering light of a campfire separating the two of them and illuminating their faces as she tells him her side of the island’s story it becomes clear that the light images have something to do with the separation of reality and insanity. Is the light throughout the film the illuminating glow of truth, or the consuming fire of sanity? This question is one to mull over while watching in order to deepen the experience. Eventually the subverting of detective tropes becomes so complete that our 50s era detectives are stripped of their iconic suits and fedoras and dressed in bright, white jumpsuits giving us a visual cue that we have left film noir behind and have been thrust into a new kind of story.
What genre that story resides in exactly is debatable, but it certainly hovers close to horror. DiCaprio’s character, after (perhaps?) being drugged by the hospital staff is prone to startling dreams and hallucinations. They include blood soaked women, murdered children, and flashbacks to a concentration camp liberation that the character took part of in WWII. Corpses are plentiful. Graphic, bloody, surreal images stack up one upon the next and blur into a horrific stream of consciousness. The scenes are punctuated by a dark, foreboding score that sometimes gives way to abrasive, punched notes on the piano not entirely unlike the stabbing music for that iconic shower scene in Psycho. When the trail of the investigation leads the marshals into the most locked down part of the hospital, an old civil war fort, during a mass breakout of the most dangerous psychopaths on the island, the film turns into a full blown haunted house movie. The men are alone, stripped of their uniforms, their weapons, their authority, and locked in a dark, gothic castle with innumerable horrors and insanities lurking around every corner and in every shadow. If Shutter Island succeeds fully at anything, it’s at being more tense and scary than any straight up horror movie I’ve sat through in as long as I can remember.
The work Scorcese does at building an effective horror/thriller is further elevated by the mostly outstanding performances he gets out of his cast. DiCaprio is the lead and has by far the most to do. His role is a rollercoaster of anger, shock, violence, fear, doubt, etcetera, and he hits every note pitch perfect. His best work as an actor has come, at least most recently, from his pairings with Scorcese, and the two keep their streak of solid partnerships alive here. Ben Kingsley is a joy to watch as Dr. Cawley, the film’s main antagonist. He plays his character as severe and judgmental, making him unlikable enough to root against, but he overlays that with an obvious caring for his patients and a dedication to his job that makes him impossible to hate. Often times you begin to wonder who really is right and who is wrong, who is good and who is evil, and that is largely thanks to the three-dimensional characters the actors create. Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson play a pair of afflicted women key to the film’s plot and both are memorable and believable embodying rather out-there parts. Elias Koteas and Jackie Earle Haley play a pair of inmates, both dangerous and deranged. They play crazy creep well, and add to the horror elements of the movie with chilling performances. Haley is especially enthralling, given the chance to monologue to DiCaprio while in a totally insane state; once again the flickering light of a series of matches separating the two characters’ faces as question are raised and stories are told. What is real in this scene? What is mere insanity? The layers of unreliable narration run deep. Mark Ruffalo alone had me disappointed with his performance. His delivery of the period dialogue felt robotic and rehearsed. He seemed uncomfortable in his skin and unable to pull off the authority necessary to play a movie detective. Developments late in the plot had me rethinking his performance, though. Maybe his choices were deliberate and purposeful? Was his performance lackluster or subtle and nuanced? His track record is strong enough to lead me to believe that the latter is probably the case and the opportunity to further study his performance alone is reason enough to re-watch this one and try to peel away it’s layers.
Overall, I had only a few small problems with this film. The third act goes in a direction that has been too well worn over the last decade, there’s some distractingly bad green screen work that is inexcusable in this era of special effects, a few minutes could have been shaved off the run time, and the resolution wraps itself up a bit too neat and concretely for a movie that raises so many questions of ambiguity. None of that was too important or too damaging, though. What you get is a well acted, beautifully shot, atmospheric thriller that requires enough analyzing and re-watching to keep fans of classic Hitchcock happy, but remains scary and entertaining enough to be enjoyed by pretty much anybody.
