Susan Granger’s review of “Shutter Island” (Paramount Pictures)
After finally winning his first Oscar for “The Departed” three years ago, after more than four decades of making movies, Martin Scorsese just wants to have fun with this dark, intense psychological thriller, set in the anxious Cold War era of 1954, and based on a mind-bending mystery by Dennis Lehane.
As it begins, a seasick, emotionally tormented federal marshal, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), are taking the ferry across foggy Boston Harbor to Shutter Island, where a forbidding Civil War fortress, Ashecliffe Hospital, houses the dangerous, criminally insane. As a torrential storm approaches, their mission is investigate the disappearance of an inmate who was incarcerated for drowning her three children and escaped from her tiny, windowless cell, leaving a cryptic note; within its electrified perimeter, she must be hiding somewhere on the craggy, densely forested island. Imperious Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) is helpful but secretive, as is suspiciously accented Dr. Naehring (Max Von Sydow), zealously guarding what happens to patients in notorious Ward C.
But chain-smoking, migraine-plagued, conflicted Teddy is on a cathartic journey, burdened with eerie nightmares about the fiery murder of his wife (Michelle Williams) by a pyromaniac who set fire to their apartment, as well as gruesome visions of W.W.II atrocities he witnessed as a soldier who helped liberate Dachau concentration camp.
Adapted by screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, the script maintains the intricate structure and ambiguous tenor of Lehane’s bestseller. So it’s up to Martin Scorsese to create and sustain the pervasively claustrophobic, densely ominous menace, filled with the lurid kind of gothic imagery that keeps the adrenaline pumping, and augmented by atonal, dissonant, spooky music. As a result, it’s difficult to separate reality from paranoid fantasy. That’s the point of this scary, weird, enigmatic film, which features Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson, and evokes memories of Scorsese’s 1991 remake of “Cape Fear.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Shutter Island” is a disturbing, deliberately deceptive 8, layered with labyrinthine medical, legal, historical and political issues.
