Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo in "Shutter Island." Copyright(c) Paramount Pictures.
Martin Scorsese is back with his modern day muse Leonardo DiCaprio to see what other genre they can conquer. When last they were together, they gave us the Oscar-winning The Departed, and before that they gave us the Oscar-nominated epics The Aviator and Gangs of New York. Have they done it again?
Well, no. But as Scorsese movies go, Shutter Island is not an island unto itself. It’s akin to Scorsese’s other creepy thriller Cape Fear. It keeps you guessing and has enough twists and turns (and Scorsese-level violence) to get you to squirm a bit in your seat.
Despite the look of the promos, Shutter Island is not a supernatural-themed horror movie. Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel, it’s more a trippy journey into the mind. DiCaprio’s federal marshal Teddy Daniels is called to Shutter Island, an isolated mental hospital/prison for only the most violent of patients. One patient, a three-time child murderer, has managed to escape her cell without being seen, and even on an island with nowhere to go, has also managed to vanish. Daniels is charged with finding her, and as he mingles with the staff and inmates, we see he’s in danger of being a little touched in the head himself. The army veteran is coping with the death of his wife and with guilt over things he did and saw ten years earlier in World War II.
To play the marshal, Scorsese certainly needed someone he could rely on. DiCaprio is in every scene, and we see the horrors of Shutter Island entirely through his eyes. He takes us exactly where Scorsese wants us to go. That’s not to say DiCaprio carries the movie entirely on his shoulders. There are solid (and sometimes creepy) performances from Mark Ruffalo, Max Von Sydow, Ben Kingsley and Jackie Earle Haley (continuing a string of great performances as guys who aren’t all there – see Little Children or Watchmen).
What exactly are we looking at as we wind through the Shutter Island labyrinth? That’s the fun of the movie, as Daniels starts to question who he can trust, what their motivations are and what’s even real in the first place. And there are real surprises. I admit at one point I was disappointed when I thought I had it all figured out – and thought the solution was something I’d seen before in better movies. But Lehane’s story fooled me.
Scorsese does make a couple of mistakes that keep Shutter Island from being one of his best movies. One is just a quibble – I can’t believe a filmmaker with the master skills of Martin Scorsese relies on the old cliché of a guy waking up suddenly in a cold sweat and sitting straight up. Maybe my nightmares aren’t bad enough to know, but don’t people generally just wake up by opening their eyes?
Worse, Scorsese lets the movie go too long. Once the final secrets of Shutter Island are revealed, he really needed to go to black and put up the credit “Directed by Martin Scorsese.” Instead, what was explained to us once is then acted out for us, and then explained again ad infinitum. There’s even a scene that perhaps even the most avid Scorsese fan – with all the graphic imagery that comes with the distinction – might find too much. Martin, there was no need to go crazy.