Shutter Island
Set in Boston, 1954, Shutter Island tells the story of U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio). He arrives, we’re told, at the island’s psychiatric hospital to investigate the disappearance of a woman who drowned her three children. We’ve seen so many films which play with perception versus reality in a psychiatric setting. Here, director Martin Scorsese does the unimaginable, taking a tired premise and compelling you to watch every minute of every scene.
The film begins with Teddy and his cohort, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) aboard a boat, enroute to the island. We don’t know how they got to the boat, a point worth noting. In the periphery of the next, wide shot, you can see a dozen guards combing the fields. When Teddy and Chuck appear on the island, the missing patient, Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), has left a cryptic note: “RULE OF FOUR. WHO IS 67?” The details on Rachel are sketchy, but we know that she suffers from delusions, imagining the cell as her home and the staff and patients as her neighbors. The investigation takes Teddy through the labyrinthine facility. He encounters Dr. Cawley, played by Ben Kingsley whose shaved head and pencil-thin goatee give the character a sinister appearance. Not a beat after I pondered, “Hey, he looks like Ming the Merciless,” guess who shows up? Enter Max Von Sydow as the mysterious Dr. Nehring, who may or may not have been a Nazi scientist.
A storm thrashes the island; Teddy ends up staying the night at the hospitality of Dr. Cawley. He begins to experience bizarre dreams about his wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), and his tour of duty which ended at Dachau. He suffers tremendous guilt for the massacre of German POW’s, which he characterizes as murder—unrestrained revenge for the gruesome sight of piles upon piles of concentration camp prisoners. From here, Teddy’s sanity begins to unravel into several threads that slowly reveal a more elaborate story behind the crime. The water even seeps into his nightmares.
My reaction during the opening scenes of Shutter Island was misguidedly tepid, because I didn’t know what I was looking at. Neither will you, at first. An odd use of chroma key (a.k.a. “bluescreen” or “greenscreen”) peppers certain scenes, but not without reason. Mr. Scorsese is telling a story of questionable veracity, not unlike Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects. He works in a style similar to that of Citizen Kane, incorporating a lifetime’s worth of camera technique, editing, use of space, depth, and myriad other tools in his belt in the process of scene and narrative composition.
A graduate of New York University, Martin Scorsese became friends with USC alumni George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, and earned a place as Roger Corman’s protégé. The motion picture industry was changing as the major studio founders were retiring, selling off their interests to large, corporate conglomerates whose management didn’t understand filmmaking in the least. This left ajar a narrow window for young directors such as Mr. Scorsese, influenced by the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealists, to gain carte blanche from studio heads who saw these film school prodigies as the ticket to capturing the young adult market with grittier films appealing to Vietnam-era sensibilities. In this atmosphere, Mr. Scorsese crafted superlative narratives surrounding iconic characters. His storied career culminated in receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement in motion pictures at the 67th Golden Globe Awards earlier this year.
In his craft, Mr. Scorsese is like Buddy Rich, dynamically gunning out more tonality, depth and rhythm from a four piece kit than James Cameron’s ham-fisted, three-hour solo on his latest twenty-piece contraption. Like Kane’s cinematographer Gregg Toland, Robert Richardson deftly employs forced perspective imposingly. Stanley Kubrick’s signature use of empty architectural spaces is incorporated to agitating and unsettling effect. In addition to increasing the visual space, deep focus is utilized to induce vertigo.
Apropos, the film’s steady buildup of psychological suspense is comparable to Hitchock’s thriller, with its imposing Bernard Hermann score, channeled here by Robbie Robertson. Note the usage of foghorn-like brass in the opening scene, and throughout, cleverly focusing our subconscious upon a nearby lighthouse.
Mr. Scorsese cut his teeth on low-budget films. He tells his stories through meticulously-crafted details in relatively narrow visual space. In a single shot of Ben Kingsley’s expressive eyes, we can be confused about the doctor’s motives. One might notice that Teddy’s suit jacket looks two inches too long, or wonder how he got on the boat with Chuck, who calls him “boss” in a tone bridging the hair’s width between assurance and patronization. Notice the trepidation of the wardens who greet them, or the patients they interrogate. We even begin to take note of oddly consistent casting: Elias Koteas, the serial killer in Fallen, playing a pyromaniac. Ted Levine as the head warden, a.k.a. Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. Jackie Earle Haley, as another psychopath, playing child murderer Freddy Krueger in the upcoming remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The lead, Leonardo DiCaprio has had a varied career, beginning in television, appearing in a range of films including The Basketball Diaries and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, and finally breaking out as Kate Winslet’s impoverished suitor in Mr. Cameron’s Titanic. He has become Mr. Scorsese’s favorite, with standout performances in The Aviator and The Departed. Here, he continues to develop his chops in the role of the deeply flawed or morally corrupted authority figure—a trademark of Mr. Scorsese’s. However, he still needs to develop his own voice. Squinty-eyed and dyspeptic, he seems to be echoing shades of a young Jack Nicholson, who played Irish mob boss Frank Costello alongside him in The Departed.
Unlike The Usual Suspects and the slough of twist-driven films which followed, Shutter Island doesn’t slam you with an ending out of left field. The revelation is actually predictable as early as the end of the first act, if you’re paying close attention. But that’s not the point. The film, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, methodically unhinges your perceptions, focusing less on spectacle or surprise than maintaining suspense by way of a character puzzle being solved one piece at a time. And even then, the mystery being solved isn’t the one you think it is. The real question, as Teddy puts it: “Is it better to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”
The film is ultimately about the five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Shutter Island • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 • Running Time: 138 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content, language and some nudity. • Distributed by Paramount Pictures