SHUTTER ISLAND – martin scorsese – 6.5 / 10

The reason that there are so many films about World War II has, I think, a lot to do with the Holocaust. A filmmaker can easily piggyback on the horror of the death camps as a sort of emotional shorthand. A few shots of emaciated corpses and grief-stricken loved ones and the film gains an instant amount of emotional credibility. Similarly, filmmakers so often give their main characters tragic pasts (dead wives, dead children, both in the case of Shutter Island) because it allows them to easily and without any real effort make the audience care about and feel for their protagonists. This tactic is clumsy and cheap but it’s undeniably effective.


Dennis Lehane, the author of the novel on which Shutter Island is based, is a particularly egregious example of this type of storyteller, having used murdered and exploited children as the engine that drives almost all of his novels (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River, etc.). Martin Scorsese, on the other hand, is a filmmaker who has largely avoided falling into this particular trap, relying instead on a mastery of craft and storytelling to earn an audience’s sympathy. Based on that you might think that combining Scorsese’s demonstrable gifts as a filmmaker with Lehane’s lurid plotting would result in, at the very least, an enjoyably pulpy film. But Shutter Island aims for a lot more than simply being an interesting pulp thriller. And its ambitions are its ultimate undoing.

The film begins effectively enough, introducing Leonardo DiCaprio’s U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels on a rusty, fog-shrouded boat as it makes it way towards the eerily looming Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliff Hospital for the criminally insane. The approach to the island and then, once on the island, the trip to Ashecliff are both filmed and edited in bravura Scorsese style, full of menace and dread. This sequence also firmly plants the hook of what purports to the be the film’s central mystery: the disappearance of one of the hospital’s inmates, a woman who murdered her three children and now refuses to acknowledge either that her children are dead or that she’s in a mental hospital.

It becomes clear soon enough, however, that there’s more going on in Shutter Island than it at first appears. Teddy is tormented by memories of his dead wife Dolores (Michelle Williams (mangling a Boston accent)) and by flashbacks to the day he helped liberate the concentration camp at Dachau. These interstitial bits, filmed with exquisite precision and positively vibrating with grief, are easily the best things in the film. One particularly striking dream sequence, scored with Max Richter’s haunting ‘On the Nature of Daylight,’ finds Teddy trying to hold on to a bleeding Dolores as the apartment around them simultaneously floods and burns to the ground.

But as these dreams and flashbacks become more prevalent and begin to bleed over into the ‘real’ world, the foundation upon which the film’s mystery plot rests begins to crumble. It’s clear that much of what the audience is seeing is suspect in some way. A patient being interviewed by Teddy and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo, also trying on a Boston accent despite the fact that his character is supposed to hail from Seattle) asks for a glass of water. In successive shots the glass appears and disappears in her hand as she takes a sip. It’s details like that-- too obvious to have gone unnoticed by skilled filmmakers like Scorsese and his long time editor Thelma Schoonmaker-- that accumulate over the first hour or so of the film, clearly indicating that not everything that the audience is seeing is on the level.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with that. And I won’t spoil the film’s major surprise here (though there is a particular event that happens about an hour in that makes it pretty damn easy to see that ending coming) but once it’s established that a major twist is coming, it becomes increasingly difficult to sit through successive scenes of meandering conversations about the nature of violence without getting impatient for the film to get to its twist already. It’s no coincidence that the most effective films that hinge on late-in-the-game twists hurtle forward at breakneck pace (Fight Club or Gone Baby Gone, for instance). The slow stately pace of Shutter Island starts to really grate by the two-hour mark. It’s bad enough that the audience is (most likely) well ahead of the narrative but pushing the reveal further and further down the line makes it increasingly difficult for the audience to care about that reveal when it finally comes.

But this is Scorsese after all, one of the most assured visual stylists to ever pick up a camera. So as tedious as some of the film’s final scenes might be (Teddy’s conversation in a cave with Patricia Clarkson is particularly interminable), the ending still packs a punch. The film’s very last scene, for instance, is extraordinarily haunting, leaving the audience to contemplate whether knowing the truth-- often held up in the rest of the film as the highest of virtues-- is really all that desirable if it will ultimately destroy you.

Unfortunately, the two and a quarter hours that precede that last moment don’t quite add up to a rewarding film-going experience. There’s a very real sense that a lot of what the audience has just seen has been smoke and mirrors, well-photographed, well-acted scenes that don’t amount to much once they’re revealed to be less than they’d at first seemed. That sense of not enough there there, along with the overly slow pace of the film’s last act (exactly when it should’ve been picking up steam) renders the experience of watching the film somewhat unsatisfactory. Like any Scorsese picture, though, it’s worth seeing for its visual poetry alone.