MOVIE REVIEW: Shutter Island

by Jonathan Doyle

Based on Shutter Island's effective, but relatively generic trailer, you'd have no way of knowing that this seemingly by-the-numbers horror film is actually one of Martin Scorsese's most ambitious, assured and enigmatic films to date. There's a tendency to speak of Scorsese's considerable talents in terms of "technical virtuosity," as if he simply knows how to push the right buttons on the tools at his disposal. However, as Shutter Island proves, this technical skill is at the service of something much more substantial: Scorsese's incredibly rich and original imagination. He shoots scenes in a manner that is visually striking, yes, but he also invests even the most mundane moments with unexpected detail, insight and purpose. He's the consummate filmmaker, but with the wealth of wildly original ideas on display here, you get the sense that he could thrive in any creative field.

Even the most rudimentary description of the film's plot runs the risk of spoiling its many surprises, but it's also worth noting that this isn't the straightforward, story-driven exercise in suspense that it appears to be. Scorsese evokes a wide range of respectable horror films -- including ghost story/mental illness hybrids like The Innocents, The Shining and Let's Scare Jessica to Death -- but like Scorsese, these filmmakers all had much more on their mind than straightforward thrills and chills. These films all offer a traditional sense of narrative engagement while also plunging viewers into a terrifyingly uncertain, reality-questioning metaphysical space.

It's no accident that serious-minded auteurs ranging from Ingmar Bergman to David Lynch have always hovered around the horror film. In spite of its disreputability, horror is the one genre that actually gains commercial viability from its use of ambiguity and transcendental sensations. In Shutter Island, Scorsese does everything necessary to keep casual filmgoers interested, but you can tell where his real passion lies. He locks in on the film's most supernatural elements and uses them to investigate the internal mysteries that have fascinated him for decades.

Given its genre film trappings, Shutter Island has surprising dramatic weight, building a sense of personal apocalypse that is worthy of Scorsese's most powerful and unnerving films. This uncharacteristically dramatic use of genre has become a trademark of Dennis Lehane screen adaptations (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone) -- and Shutter Island is easily the most accomplished of the three.

Much like The Aviator, Shutter Island suggests that Scorsese is most comfortable working in a bygone era from his own life, one that he experienced -- and therefore relays -- through largely cinematic touchstones. And yet neither this film nor The Aviator ever feels like a dusty relic from another era. Both films are invested with the dark philosophical ideas of the present. So personal is Scorsese's approach that it seems reasonable to link the psychological unraveling of these protagonists with the 67-year-old auteur's own fears about mortality and diminishing faculties. No theme is repeated in Scorsese's films by accident.

These are very specific characters in very specific circumstances, but their stories have a significance that transcends their context. Ultimately, this ability to find broader resonance in clearly defined, even conventional narratives is the great leap forward of Scorsese's later career. Like Kurosawa or Bergman, he's evolved into a wise old master with a clear-headed understanding of the world around him. If his films once relied too heavily on jarring violence or predictably offputting characters (King of Comedy anyone?), he's now exhibiting a more generous, Renoirian humanism (no, the villains in this film aren't what you think) that nonetheless retains the harsh, unforgiving brutality at the core of his worldview.

The film's most fascinating quality -- and the quality that has always defined Scorsese's best films, from Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to Casino and (particularly) The Aviator -- is Scorsese's masterful handling of subjectivity. A real consideration of this would run the risk of spoiling much of what makes Shutter Island such a startling experience, but it should be said that Scorsese has never found material this rich with subjective potential. He strategically with-holds crucial context for much of the film, creating a slowly unraveling complicity between audience and protagonist.

Entire sections of the film can be retroactively understood as elaborate fictions (which should make for rewarding repeat viewings) and, in all but a few carefully selected moments, Scorsese protects the audience from anything outside Teddy Daniels' perspective. Daniels doesn't understand what's happening to him and neither do we, which causes the audience to feel a sense of alarming disorientation not unlike the mental illness that surrounds Daniels during his investigation. When reality comes more clearly into focus, we can't help but identify with Daniels' reaction. After all, we're simultaneously processing the exact same shock.

The film's multi-faceted exploration of subjectivity is also rich with thematic significance. Like The Departed, Shutter Island deals with timely issues of perception, specifically the elusive nature of reality in a world where authority figures so often misrepresent (or simply lie) about their intentions. When should we trust those in power and, if our own perceptions clash with the official story, should we doubt those perceptions? By constructing an almost Matrix-like sense of controlled alternate reality (in this case, an isolated island that may be an elaborate science experiment), the film plunges us into a world where all links to reality are tenuous at best.

While Scorsese, Lehane and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis deserve all kinds of praise for the ideas that fuel this masterfully conceived film, its aesthetic triumphs are also significant. This would not have been possible without cinematographer Robert Richardson (Casino, The Aviator), who always raises Scorsese's game. Why the director chooses to alternate between Richardson and Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Departed) is hard to say, as the baroque tendencies of Richardson's approach tend to be a better fit for Scorsese's dynamic directorial style than Ballhaus' more muted classicism. Not since the heyday of his collaboration with Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) has Scorsese achieved the stylistic heights of his collaboration with Richardson.

This also proves to be Leonardo DiCaprio's third stellar Scorsese collaboration in a row, rendering the borderline embarrassment of his Gangs of New York performance -- more the script's fault than DiCaprio's -- a distant memory. Even in his mid-thirties, DiCaprio has an inescapable child-like quality and it's never been put to better use. There's something unconvincing about his performance in some of the early scenes, almost like a child playing dress-up. However, it slowly becomes apparent that this is a deliberate strategy, laying the groundwork for the character's unforeseeably tragic dimensions.

Of course, there's no reason to believe that a film this daring will be met with commercial success or unanimous critical praise. Some early reviews have already dismissed Shutter Island as a minor Scorsese genre effort along the lines of Cape Fear (arguably his weakest film), a view that suggests a certain obliviousness to the film's many subtleties. Combining intellectual exploration, visual experimentation and an inventive use of history (cinematic and otherwise), this is the kind of film that Scorsese should have been making all along. Truth be told, it makes the inexplicably celebrated The Departed -- an impressive film, but by no means the career-defining triumph its reception suggested -- look like a minor genre exercise by comparison. This is Scorsese turned up to eleven... and that's exactly where we want him to be.