Shutter Island (2010)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Key Actors: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Emily Mortimer
Rating: 9/10

"Are you ok, boss?". By the second time Ruffalo's Chuck enquires his boss Teddy Daniels (Leo) about his state of mind/health, we begin to feel an eerie sense of discomfort. Initially intended as a vehicle for David Fincher, Scorsese's Shutter Island could well have been directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (Le corbeau, Diabolique) and Stanley Kubrick (The Shining) together. In fact, it was Kubrick's Shining that came to my mind as I spent an entire afternoon reflecting on Shutter Island. Is this the Shining of this generation? Well, it certainly has enough degeneration to be called so. The beauty of Shutter Island is the way it synthesizes mystery (like Le corbeau) and psychological horror (like The Shining) with traces of Classic Noir (like Laura or Murder My Sweet).

Trench coats and fedora hats made me think that Shutter Island is going to offer dark detective suspense with lot of crime. While it does offer enough mental crime, it transcends the limitations of the noir genre and culminates somewhere high above as a dark art of masterful imagination. The movie makes one constantly wonder about where reality ends and fiction begins. The trouble is reality sometimes is so distorted (as in real life experiences), it becomes hard to separate it from fiction and wonder where we are supposed to draw the lines.

Teddy Daniels is a detective sent to Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a criminally insane patient. The Island is a place where mentally ill criminals are tended to, in an effort to make them better. Dr. Cawley, the man who runs the facility, devices ways and means to make these people become socially functional humans again. He somewhat comes across as cold and immune to his patients feelings but he is surely a man who takes his job very seriously. Chuck, Teddy's partner (another brilliant performance by Mark Ruffalo, whom I can never forget from Zodiac), helps Teddy maintain his sanity in a place where its hard to find (and keep). Things begin to unfold in a dramatic and unpredictable way for Teddy as he soon discovers that there is more to the story than what meets the eye. He has a strange rendezvous with the missing patient, who makes him question his own role in the whole investigation. Does Teddy know what exactly is happening at the institute? Is he being used as a scapegoat? Can he trust Chuck and Dr. Cawley at all?

Shutter Island has some of the most disturbing images you could see in a movie like this. It’s hard enough to watch piles and piles of frozen humans with more being butchered across them but it’s even harder to stomach the scenes of children being drowned. I guess this is not a date movie or something you should go to on a stomach upset day. On the contrary, the movie also has some of the most beautiful images that will not leave the mind for a while. Scenes of Leo imagining his wife (while she turns to dust) or papers cascading across the bedroom while Leo is lost in thoughts are as wonderfully crafted as they come. Scorsese is getting better with age. I think he gave his best present yet to Leo (Gangs of NY, The Aviator, The Departed), with whom this will be his fourth.

It’s easy to dislike the movie if you went along with the ride and feel deceived through its distorted sense of reality but it’s also easy to admire the movie because of how it constructs a parallel universe that can only exist in the mind and yet seem real to the person who is creating it. It’s already tough to go through what Leo's Ted has to go through but without his defense mechanisms, probably he would have turned out to be worse than what he becomes. Like he tells Chuck at the end with a certain degree of nonchalance, the question is whether to live a long life as a brute or die soon as a good man. Ted is a good man; and Shutter Island is one hell of a good movie.