Shutter Island ( 2010 )

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, & Max Von Sydow

Directed by Martin Scorsese


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/


Martin Scorsese is sometimes accused of being cooped up in a finite set of subjects:  gangsters and cops and violence and sin and redemption and such.  But, in fact, the great director’s long resume is actually quite varied, including a boxing movie (“Raging Bull”), a biblical epic (“The Last Temptation of Christ”), a costume drama (“The Age of Innocence”), a biopic (“The Aviator”), a musical (“New York, New York”), two concert films (“The Last Waltz,” “Shine a Light”), a biographical documentary (“No Direction Home”), a melodrama (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More”) and even an outright comedy (“After Hours”).

With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt:  not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”  And while a story about a mystery at a maximum security facility for the criminally insane would seem like familiar Scorsese fare on the face of it, “Shutter Island” allows the director and his (now four-time) star Leonardo DiCaprio to explore new areas of creativity and expression and take their audience on a bracing ride.

They do so, by and large, with relish and muscle and within the confines of Lehane’s clever and taut plot.  DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a U. S. Marshal sent in 1956 to a forbidding spot off the coast of Massachusetts to discover how a child murderess has, apparently, vanished from the place.  Accompanied by a new partner (Mark Ruffalo) and running into walls of interference placed before him by a haughty team of doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow), Daniels is drawn deeper and deeper into sweat and paranoia and confusion and, ultimately, certainty that the island hospital is a deeply nefarious place, as bad, he thinks, as the concentration camp he liberated in Germany a decade previously.

Daniels is a clenched fellow, a reformed alcoholic haunted by nightmares of his war experience and of his beloved wife (Michelle Williams), who died in an arson fire.  His personal ghosts drive him terribly forward, despite the resistance of hospital officials and guards, despite the warnings of his partner, despite, even, a raging hurricane and the island’s often impassable terrain.  As per the genre, the deeper he probes, the greater the danger in which he finds himself, the more frightening the truths that seem to be emerging, and the less he can truly be sure about what is really happening to him and what is not.

DiCaprio is in intense mettle here and carries the film handily even as Scorsese piles on chilling and gruesome stuff for him to cut through.  I can’t think of another current actor who has managed to hold on to his boyishness (the one-time child star is now 35) while accruing a legitimate patina of mature discernment and pain and rue.  Among the supporting players, Kingsley is nicely contained and stern, Williams has a fitting spookiness, and there are memorable one-scene turns by Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley as island inhabitants who help Daniels find his path.

The grisliness of “Shutter Island” -- corpses and bloodshed and truly nightmarish nightmares -- seems to have sparked Scorsese.  The movie has a pep that was lacking in the Oscar-winner “The Departed,” perhaps because it has a literary source and not, as that film did, a filmic one.  The modern music adds jarring but apt notes, Robert Richardson’s cinematography and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing are predictably masterful and potent, and the special effects sequences are modulated to serve the plot and not dazzle superficially.  But it is chiefly the director’s show -- or, more exactly, his and his star’s, which is how Scorsese seems happiest to work.

There’s a slowness to the film that can feel like strain, and now and then the scenes of Daniels’ inner torments can run toward the long and arbitrary.  But “Shutter Island” is atmospheric, absorbing and completely in the control of the man who made it -- unlike, especially, “Bringing Out the Dead,” which it sometimes resembles.  If it only tangentially seems like a Scorsese film, that’s because we’ve incorrectly pigeonholed a director who has almost always pursued a career of shifts and gambits and new paths.

Overall Rating ( * * * 1/2 )

Mr. What?