SHUTTER ISLAND
by Les Phillips

Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's latest film, is a strange and challenging work from an important artist. The first twenty minutes are not inviting: a somewhat dim federal marshal, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his sidekick (Mark Ruffalo) appear out of an ocean fog, riding a ghost ship to an island prison-sanitarium, where they enter the Gothic castle and meet Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the mad scientist who runs the asylum. Later, over brandy, seated by the big dark fireplace in the big dark mansion, they meet an even madder Nazi doctor (Max Von Sydow). It is a dark and stormy night, the familiar dialogue seems lame, and the music is ponderous. Has Scorsese gone daft?

Not in the least. Shutter Island is a deep and brilliant exposition of guilt and trauma, a meditation on the role of punishment in consciousness, and, ultimately, a meditation on how and whether we know what we think we know. Teddy Daniels is an inquiring detective with a past; or is his past present? He's come to Shutter Island to find an escaped patient. He's compelled, literally, to search for the truth, to avenge a wrong that's been committed; and his search leads through woods and caves and dungeons. Forget the laughable Fifties Freud that the doctors are spouting; Dante is here, and so are Joseph Campbell and Homer and Foucault and R.D. Laing.and Dürer, not to mention Jacob, wrestling with his angel. Disregard the screenplay. Nietzsche wrote of the "prison-house of language;" Scorsese creates a prison house of images. Teddy digs deeper and deeper, and we follow him into an intense, layered agony. It's an exhausting, rewarding experience.

A.O. Scott's barbarous review in the New York Times consigns Scorsese to the Academy of the Overrated; if you like Shutter Island, you're a complacent hack for an over-the-hill director. It's Scott who's gone daft, not to mention complacent and perhaps lazy (see "whether we know what we think we know," above). Several other critics have complained that the film's story makes no sense; they have confused the plot with the story.

Shutter Island is rough work. Scorsese has infused a mundane horror novel with a complex, urgent subtext; I wish the frame were a better fit for the portrait. I wish Scorsese had been more restrained in his use of flashbacks. Kingsley, von Sydow, Patricia Clarkson, and especiallly DiCaprio are very fine; but Michelle Williams is tepid, and nobody figured out what Mark Ruffalo should do with his thankless lummox role. (The attempted Boston accents should have been dispensed with.).

Yet the energy and vision at the core of Shutter Island are unforgettable. Scorsese's great achievement here is to make you experience Teddy Daniels's worst nightmare as if it were your own. His dream, his wound, your own.


©2010 Les Phillips
CineScene