Martin Scorsese, Paramount (12/03/10)

Shutter Island is directed by Martin Scorsese, which makes it a major event in the movie calendar, but which also puts the film under additional pressure from a critical perspective.

Creatively speaking, Scorsese set his personal bar dizzyingly high at a comparatively young age. Any new film he releases is always judged against his best work and anything less than outright brilliance is regarded as a disappointment. What people tend to overlook is that even a middling Scorsese picture, which I suppose is where Shutter Island lies, is still streets ahead of practically every other film currently showing in your local multiplex.

It takes a director of Scorsese’s calibre to handle the genre mash-up that is Shutter Island. Part mystery thriller and part gothic horror the film’s story takes archetypal noir characters and drops them into a chillingly remote setting before cutting off all means of escape. The film, set in 1954, is based on the book by Dennis Lehane who also wrote Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone. From this piece of information we can ascertain two things. Firstly, the going will be grim throughout and secondly, children will suffer somewhere along the way.

Lehane’s chief protagonist is Teddy Daniels played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Daniels is a U.S. Marshal who wears the traditional fedora and trench coat but also an unexplained plaster on his forehead and a really bad tie. With a new partner in tow the Marshal is despatched to Shutter Island which is home to the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane. One of the inmates, Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer) who was imprisoned for drowning her children (see, I told you so,) has vanished from her locked cell before seemingly being spirited off the isle. It is up to the U.S. Marshals to track her down.

As Teddy questions both patients and staff he is helped but equally hindered by the hospital’s head psychiatrist Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley.) The doctor is progressive by the standards of the time favouring therapy as a primary source of treatment instead of the more direct method of administering a swift lobotomy. He is not the only impediment to Daniels solving the case as the Marshal finds himself beset by blinding headaches and terrible nightmares not long after his arrival on the island.

Daniels may have landed with little actual luggage but he brings considerable psychological baggage with him. Traumatised after helping to liberate a concentration camp in World War II Daniels is also haunted by the death of his wife (Michelle Williams) in an arson attack on the couple’s apartment building. We later learn that the lawman has multiple agendas for being on Shutter Island which give him a personal interest in Solando’s disappearance. When a raging storm cuts off communication with the mainland Daniels finds himself trapped and forced to confront the evil on Shutter Island as well as his own personal demons.

Shutter Island begins with a wonderful establishing shot of the ferry carrying Teddy Daniels emerging through a thick fog. This is a pretty good clue as to how things are going to be for the next couple of hours as the audience’s perception of events remains shrouded throughout. This is not so much a ‘whodunit’ as a ‘whatsgoingon’, a gripping puzzle with enough twists and turns to keep the truth just out of reach until the end (and even then, there is a final trick which will provoke many a post-screening debate in the pub afterwards). The good thing about this film is that you are never entirely sure.

Stylistically, the film favours melodrama with Scorsese never afraid to go over the top in order to order to increase the intensity of the nightmare scenario at the centre of the story. This is also a nod to the great cinematic heritage which fuels the director’s passion and dominates his life. Were you to tone down the more graphic elements then Shutter Island looks and feels like the sort of product that Hollywood studios, in their introspective post-war mode, might have made more than fifty years ago.

Despite the bleakness of the movie’s storyline there is still a sublime beauty about Shutter Island particularly in the dream sequences. This is thanks not only to the director but also his DP Robert Richardson and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. The most visually arresting scene is where Daniels dreams that he is holding his late wife only to have her crumble to molten ash and glowing cinders in his arms. This charred detritus then accumulates and falls from on high like the black rain after Hiroshima.

The film is, of course, heavily dependent on Leonardo DiCaprio as we watch events through the eyes of his character and share his growing paranoia and increasing anxiety. DiCaprio never used to impress me that much as an actor, mainly because his looks gave the impression of a young boy who had skipped school for the day in order to shoot a movie. It seems that I was very wrong with his Teddy Daniels being a really good performance and one of his best so far. He certainly suffers for his art as he is pummelled by the elements, swims through freezing water and goes through all sorts of physical and mental torture. Did he say something rude about Scorsese’s wife perhaps and was therefore made to pay as a result? The results, by any standard, were worth it in the end.

review: Alan Diment

shutterisland.com/uk