Emotionally Empty Island an Unsatisfying Mind Game
Veteran United States Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have come to the secluded Shutter Island Mental Hospital for the Criminally Insane to solve a crime. Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer) has vanished from the institution, the supposedly quite brilliant murderess managing to get out of her locked room completely unnoticed.
Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio in Paramount Pictures' Shutter Island
What should be a straightforward investigation quickly becomes anything but, the Marshals butting heads with the facilities top man Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and his mysterious German chief physician Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow) at every turn. More so, Daniels reasons for coming to the island aren’t what they appear to be on the surface. He believes the man responsible for the death of his beloved wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) is in a cell somewhere on the grounds and it is his hope to discover his whereabouts. But Shutter Island is full of ghoulish surprises, and if the longtime peace officer isn’t careful he might find what it’s like to be a patient firsthand.
Martin Scorsese’s long delayed psychological horror thriller Shutter Island is an odd animal. From a purely technical standpoint the legendary filmmaker’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel is an outright masterpiece. Sadly, from an emotional one the film is anything but, a third act twist so silly and unbelievable it lays absolute waste to everything that comes before it. The reasons for investing emotionally in the characters or their attempts at solving the institution’s many mysteries is frustratingly pointless, and while I appreciated many aspects of the production that didn’t dilute the disappointment I felt walking out of the theatre as the final credits rolled.
For those interested in seeing the director pay homage to the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Claude Chabrol, Alfred Hitchcock and Alain Resnais there is much here for them to analyze and take in. Scorsese relishes every bit of Laeta Kalogridis (Pathfinder) intimately detailed screenplay, allowing the plot to transpire with a malevolent elegance a lesser director would have been unable to achieve. Every musical queue, every creepy sound effect, every scratch in a stone façade and every move of the camera feels eerily genuine, the auteur in such complete control his confidence manipulating it all is awe inspiring.
Unsurprisingly he also manages to garner stupendous performances from every single member of his all-star cast. DiCaprio is positively Oscar-worthy, while Ruffalo, Kingsley and Sydow find the intricate nuances of their respective characters with relative ease. Mortimer and Williams make the most of their limited screen time, while Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch and Elias Koteas all pop up from brief bits so good they’re nearly worth the price of a matinee admission on their own. Best of all is Patricia Clarkson, her pivotal scene with DiCaprio as mesmerizing as it gets. She goes right for the very heart of things, diving in full throttle to the point she becomes hypnotic, her presence lingering over the rest of the proceedings like one of Daniels’ ghostly apparitions haunting his every move.
All that’s well and good but thanks to that aforementioned climactic twist it just isn’t enough. There is a fundamental flaw here, one that was also a part of Lehane’s original novel, and it is one that Scorsese just can’t overcome. Sure all the pieces of the puzzle are here, and much like The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense a person could easily go back to the beginning and put them together with relative ease. But just because that’s so doesn’t make the fact the plot goes annoyingly off the rails a thing worth swallowing, and I have trouble thinking general audiences are going to think any differently about this than I.
Why? Because thanks to what happens at the end any and all chances for an emotional investment are smashed to pieces like waves crashing against a rocky shore. The whole movie is an obnoxious con game, the whole thing taking so much effort to add up to so very little why so many talented people came together to make it happen is a bit hard to understand. Everything here is a lie, plain and simple, and without giving anything away instead of horrifying devastation all this movie made me feel was anger that I had just sat through the darn thing.
Scorsese has walked down this road before with his remake of Cape Fear, but even though that one turned into a star-driven Freddy Krueger sequel at the end I still enjoyed it far more than I did Shutter Island. The movie was at least populated with real people facing real problems who also had real hardships to overcome so that when danger came calling I really did care about what happened to them. That doesn’t happen here, and as good as it all looks and sounds, and as dazzling as the acting is, nothing in this glossy haunted house resonates, and as far as mind games this is alas one I could care less if I ever play again.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
