After having finally secured Oscar glory with 2006’s pulpy crime thriller The Departed, director Martin Scorsese turned toward an altogether different type of pulp with his next narrative feature, an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel around the tail-end of a period practically bursting with Lehane adaptations (most notably, the Oscar-winning Mystic River from consistent Academy rival Clint Eastwood). Shutter Island was a return of sorts to a genre that the legendary filmmaker has rarely attempted – the psychological thriller, following a spider’s web of a plot into the darkest corners of a “mental institution for the criminally insane,” before a corker of a twist rewrites everything we thought we knew or understood about this story.
Scorsese’s influence is all over the screen here, from his camera sense (guided by the great cinematographer Robert Richardson) to the percussive film editing of his longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, yet the pace is perhaps a bit more intentionally languid than the previous decade’s worth or so of his efforts. From the start, we know that the film will unfold layer upon layer of understanding, particularly in the way its protagonist’s mysterious past appears in judiciously placed flashes of memory and emotion and heavily stylized digital effects, employed to communicate the character’s destabilizing relationship with reality. We begin the film meeting Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a duly appointed Federal U.S. Marshal, arriving on Shutter Island off the coast of Boston Harbor with his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), accompanying him.
They have been summoned to Ashecliffe Hospital, an asylum of sorts whose staff is run by Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), an intimidatingly credentialed psychiatrist, and whose grounds are overseen by a warden (Ted Levine) with a frightening worldview and an even scarier pair of blue, deadened eyes. Other figures here include the bullish deputy warden (John Carroll Lynch) and a seemingly kindly doctor named Naehring (Max von Sydow), each of whom has a vital role in the pieces of the mystery that develops. This is a deep supporting cast assembled by Scorsese, directing from an adapted screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, and it doesn’t end with the hospital staff and security: Teddy is also haunted by his past with a late wife, Dolores, who appears as a construct of his memory, played by Michelle Williams.
A woman named Rachel Solando (a “patient,” Cawley insists, though Teddy’s chosen term of “inmate” rings truer) has disappeared from her locked cell and vanished into the nooks and crannies of the island’s cliffs. There is no sign that she has died, since no bodies have washed ashore, but Teddy faces challenges figuring out even her identity. Is she a Rachel, played by Emily Mortimer, who drowned her children in a lake and then propped up their bodies at the kitchen table? Or does she take the form of another woman, played by Patricia Clarkson, upon whom Teddy stumbles in a cave on hospital grounds, informing him of every lie he’s been told by the staff and guards? And what to make of “Andrew Laeddis,” a mysterious figure who may or may not also be known as “Noyce” (Jackie Earle Haley), the most terrifying of the dangerous inmates in a fortified wing of the hospital, or another man (Elias Koteas) with a scar across his face?
Every clue here comes with the required bit of exposition explaining their place in the story, but the rather genius thing about this narrative and Kalogridis’ commitment to it is that the whole thing rests on a house of cards. Nothing is as it seems here, of course, as anyone who has seen the film knows all too well. There is no mystery for Teddy to solve, for he himself is Andrew Laeddis, his “partner” Chuck is actually his longtime psychiatrist and everyone in the hospital is merely acting out a simulation set up by Cawley to ease our protagonist back to reality. The point, though, is that we experience everything through Andrew/Teddy’s perspective. We learn when he does, and reality warps for us as thoroughly as it does for him.
The result is fairly straightforward as far as psychological thrillers go. Scorsese’s impulses as a director (in congress with a crew of top-notch fellow artists) and DiCaprio’s anguished performance(s) give Shutter Island a distinctiveness that any effort from a filmmaker with lesser ambitions might have lacked.
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