“Shutter Island” Review

(I make no promises that spoilers will not occur below. It is simply not possible to meaningfully discuss the film without them.)

There’s a much more interesting movie inside of “Shutter Island” that didn’t get made. The concrete basics of the story could have yielded endless fruit, but they are sabotaged by the script’s decision to reduce the entire film to a punch line. Martin Scorsese, working from a novel by Dennis Lehane, should be commended for undertaking cerebral horror, a genre rarely pursued and even more rarely done correctly. He eschews obvious scare tactics for slow burn dread, leaning heavily on atmosphere and tone to get under his audience’s skin; and since this is Marty, he does a pretty good job. The problem is, no matter how successfully he sinks his teeth into the suspense, he can’t get around the fact that “Shutter Island” doesn’t have a point of entry for the viewer. There is a protagonist, to be sure, but his emotional arc is told in such a way that we cannot really experience it with him. I wanted to love this film, but the sad truth is that I wasn’t invited to it.

The story is seemingly simple, although engaging: Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) are 1950s G-men on their way to Ashecliffe, a mental institution for only the most dangerous patients, to investigate a missing patient. Daniels is immediately suspicious of what goes on around the island, and leads the more reluctant Chuck on a journey to uncover the truth. Meanwhile, a hurricane is bearing down on the island, trapping our heroes in a situation that goes from bad to worse. It’s probably not a spoiler to tell you that things on Shutter Island are not as they appear, and this seemingly straightforward narrative soon begins interweaving elements as disparate as post traumatic stress disorder, World War II, and psychopharmacology.

Criticizing an existential thriller for being off-putting is a little like telling the rain not to be wet, but I must remain firm in my conviction that “Shutter Island’s” biggest problem is a lack of connection with the audience. The masterpieces of this genre—films like “The Shining” and “Jacob’s Ladder”—worked with similarly bleak material, but each evolved dynamic systems which kept the viewer oriented and engaged. “Ladder” relied on an extremely sympathetic central character as the logic in the world around him fell apart, but that probably wouldn’t fit this movie quite right. “The Shining” never presented an identifiable character, but it did draw on universal imagery for its ghosts, playing on human discomfort with elemental things like twins, blood, and unbroken stares. The result is that the ghosts in that film bothered us in the abstract and within the context of the story, making them very effectively unsettling. “Shutter Island” haltingly attempts to use both of these maneuvers, but ends up neither fish nor fowl.

Sometimes the movie tries to get sympathy for Teddy, but again, the structure prevents it. We have no perspective on him as a man; the movie does a poor job compensating for the mystery of Teddy’s past with a clear sense of personality. Right at the top of the second act, Scorsese seems to catch on to this problem and starts hammering us with hallucinogenic sequences. Some of these are quite beautifully constructed: the editing, cinematography and especially sound design (which never gets its due) go into overdrive and render a final product that is several steps above what was on the page. Nonetheless, there end up being too many of them, and they start getting repetitious and predictable. Even worse, they are built from highly context-specific images which we are not permitted to understand until late in the movie, and they have little resonance on their own. There is a sense that Daniels is having a completely different experience witnessing them than we are, and so we are yanked even farther away from him and his story. And, if I can be frank here, many of them are simply not that scary. Scorsese doesn’t quite have the temperament for the kind of sl0w-burn terror Kubrick so effortlessly pulled off in his masterpiece; he’s impatient with the suspense, constantly trying to climax the tension of the scene before he should.

Without question, there are strong elements to “Shutter Island,” the most significant being the performances. Scorsese is able to elicit top-level talent on his projects, and this one is no exception: DiCaprio, Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley, and Ted Levine are all on call, and without exception they are all great. DiCaprio gives one of his best and most tortured performances, Ruffalo conveys a man with a terrible weight on his shoulders, and Kingsley, as usual, makes even the slightest gesture interesting. These guys are working overtime to make this movie come to life, but they are swimming against the current. DiCaprio especially is stuck with a character who begins the movie on one note and never leaves it, which is an acting/directing/storytelling 101 mistake, and yet he gets about as much from the role as anyone could.

When it’s all said and done, “Shutter Island” is an interesting movie more than it is a good one. For fans of existential terror, it’s a temporary refreshment in a perpetual drought, but it has very little emotional impact and I can’t help but wish the order in which the story gives us information had been changed. More than any other thing, “Island” may stand as a monument to the fact that all the talent in the world cannot help you when basic fundamentals of story are not quite in the right place.