In "Shutter Island" (2010), Martin Scorsese's first feature film since "The Departed" (2006), the legendary director pays tribute to the cherished pulp detective dramas of the 1950s. Fedoras are worn stylishly, green screened scenes garishly stand out and cigarettes are always, always burning.
While the format will be off-putting to some, "Shutter Island" on the whole is a solid psychodrama worthy of the ticket price.
The film opens with a shot of a dense fog blanketing Boston Harbor. A ferry soon breaks the wall of fog as it makes its way to Shutter Island, the home of a former Civil War fort, now used as an asylum or perhaps prison for the criminally insane. The fog, the audience soon learns, foreshadows an impending hurricane.
In these opening moments, Scorsese masterfully builds tension. The setting is dark and gothic, as the asylum's cold stone overlooking jagged cliffs menaces the audience.
Scorsese's film revolves around an investigation conducted by U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) into the mysterious escape of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), an Ashecliffe inmate convicted of murdering her three children and using them as props for a dinner party. Their task is urgent and important, yet the asylum's chief psychologists appear more interested in psychoanalyzing Daniels than in finding the missing patient. The asylum's patients look at Daniels with a strange mixture of familiarity and fear, implying that a great conspiracy hovers over the island a dreadful secret of which the audience is deliberately made aware.
Robbie Robertson of The Band aids Scorsese in establishing the desired atmosphere with his soundtrack for the film, which strongly evokes an air of eeriness and foreboding with its well-placed crescendos. The soundtrack is most effective when combined with the dark, damp interior of the Ashecliffe Asylum. As Scorsese's characters make their way through a full-blown prison riot in Ward C, where the island's most dangerous patients are kept, the audience hangs on to every note.
Scorsese's approach to unveiling the film's secret, however, is perhaps the film's greatest weakness. While Lahane's novel provides excellent source material including secret patient lobotomies, anti-Soviet CIA projects and experimental psychological research Scorsese falls short in his attempt to translate the mystery's resolution onto film. And despite the film's early success in building tension, the plot falls apart later on. The ending is crudely forced the audience never gets to catch up with the conclusion's rapid turn of events.
DiCaprio gives a strong performance as Daniels, perhaps partly thanks to the actor-director familiarity he has forged with Scorsese since working with him on 2002's "Gangs of New York." DiCaprio, his Boston accent only slightly rusted since "The Departed," skillfully depicts the emotional baggage of his character, who is haunted by his deceased wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) and his belief that he is to blame for her death. Daniels is further plagued by migraines and post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by his experiences during the liberation of Dachau during World War II. DiCaprio plays this tortured soul with impressive conviction, and the unveiling of Teddy's demons forms the most powerful aspect of the film.
While not his best film, "Shutter Island" is a worthy addition to the Scorsese canon. But "Shutter Island" is not supposed to pack the same emotional punch as some of his other films such as "Raging Bull" (1980) or "Taxi Driver" (1976). Still, chock-full of chills and thrills, the film is purely a labor of love a dedication to the '50s films that inspired Scorsese's career.
