Shutter Island: Engrossing, Not Enthralling

The inmates of Ashecliffe hospital look at the new visitor with stares that might be pleading or warning. U.S. Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) has come with his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) to isolated Shutter Island in Boston Harbor to track down an escaped patient from the insane asylum. But that is only one of the enigmas Teddy must unravel. The doctors who run the institution, Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and Naehring (Max von Sydow), often respond to Teddy’s questions with strange smiles whose meaning eludes both him and the audience. Teddy too has dark secrets: searing memories of his late wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) and of his wartime experiences liberating Nazi death camps. It’s hard staying sane in a place where everyone seems to have lost his mind.

Shutter Island, the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone), ransacked nearly 2,500 years of murder-mystery tradition — from Oedipus Rex to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — and was deeply indebted to such early David Fincher films as The Game and Fight Club. The plot, set in the 1950s, is a festival of conspiracies involving Nazis, Soviets, lobotomizers, the CIA and LSD, plus some very crafty lunatics and an oddly convenient hurricane. Packed with word and number puzzles, like a Da Vinci Code with fewer chase scenes, Lehane’s story was devised for the page, not the eye. Yet its psychological twists and the sense of emotional despair at its core were bound to attract moviemakers. It landed a big one: Martin Scorsese, fresh off his belated Oscar win for The Departed, the 2006 thriller starring DiCaprio as a cop with a double identity.

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Scorsese won his great renown for films about the brotherhood of deranged machismo: Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York. But as his documentaries about American and Italian cinema show, he is also an encyclopedic connoisseur, scholar and rescuer of old movies — a video savant — who makes occasional forays into genre territory. He’s done romantic comedy (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), Merchant-Ivoryish period drama (The Age of Innocence), a musical (New York, New York) and a thriller remake (Cape Fear). Even The Departed is an American version of a Hong Kong cop movie. Now Scorsese has taken on psychological horror, adding a filigree of frissons from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Val Lewton’s artful B movies of the 1940s to Lehane’s already dense thicket of chills and tricks.

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The result is a mixed entertainment, more engrossing than enthralling, that leads moviegoers down a long hall of distorted mirrors, then pulls the expertly woven rug of plausibility from under their feet to reveal the scary graffiti on the floor. Whether you feel enlightened or swindled is your call. But stick around for the final scene, where self-knowledge may redeem the biggest monster on Shutter Island.

Teddy is there to discover the whereabouts of both the missing inmate, Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), and, for his own satisfaction, the cryptic Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas, doing a neat impression of Robert De Niro’s crazed killer in Cape Fear), who Teddy believes was responsible for Dolores’ death by fire. Quizzing the patients, he gets evidence that sounds like death threats: a man (Jackie Earle Haley, indelible in a fleeting role) tells Teddy there’s a grand plot closing in on the marshal, that he’s “the rat in a maze”; one woman scribbles the urgent word run on his notepad. His partner Chuck discounts the testimony, saying, “How’re you gonna believe a crazy guy?” But Chuck too is under Teddy’s suspicion; they’d never met before getting on the island ferry, where Chuck greeted him with a cheerful “Teddy Daniels, the man, the legend.” Is Chuck a man or a myth, an ally or a red herring?

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While Teddy tries to separate the insanity on the island from his own reality, Scorsese interlaces the more or less straightforward filming of the interrogation scenes with the hallucinogenic tragic realism of Teddy’s nightmares. At Dachau, corpses stir and papers flutter; with his wife, the camera executes a 360 around the couple as Dolores dissolves in Teddy’s embrace, her ashes swirling around the room. A grieving man’s conversation with his dearly departed has become a peculiar subtheme in a half-dozen recent movies, from Up last summer to Edge of Darkness a few weeks ago, and its popularity probably should end soon. But the trope makes sense here, given Teddy’s agitation. Dolores is both his refuge and his greatest regret. The connection between the loving dead woman and her disoriented husband is the most powerful and visually expressive in the film.

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Touch of Evil
That’s partly because Teddy feels estranged from the island’s less ethereal inhabitants. DiCaprio makes Teddy sometimes cagey-witty, sometimes stupid (he keeps mispronouncing escape as excape). Gruff and heavier than usual, with a few days’ beard, he could be channeling Orson Welles’ wily lawman in Touch of Evil. The onetime heartthrob from Titanic has always been a shifty character actor in a movie star’s body. A star performance here would give the audience someone to root for; DiCaprio instead provides them with the spectacle of a creature fighting to creep toward a freedom that might kill him.

Audiences are so used to movies’ easy seductions, with big jokes and jolts, that they may misread or discard the picture’s potent message: that some things about ourselves are so painful to acknowledge, we almost wish we could cut them out of our skulls. This, and not the plot gimmickry, is what must have lured Scorsese to Shutter Island: the chance to leave audiences with an illuminating emptiness.

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