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Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese makes a hallucinatory horror film.
Just about the last project you’d expect from Scorsese would be a hallucinatory horror film on the order of The Shining, but with Shutter Island, the director sets out to make a film that has the simple power to scare people—and more or less succeeds. Certainly, what’s special about the movie has little to do with the premise (or presumably with Dennis Lehane’s novel). It’s 1954, and two federal marshals (DiCaprio and Ruffalo) have been assigned to investigate a patient’s disappearance on an island mental institution off Boston.
What’s interesting is that in grappling with the popularization of psychology, the aftermath of the war and the Red Scare, Scorsese essentially has license to treat the material as his personal homage fest; he references everything from The Third Man to Vertigo and gives full force to the delirious color of Robert Richardson’s cinematography. In its fantastical interludes and privileging of suspense over logic, Shutter Island may be the closest Scorsese has come to the spirit of his idol Michael Powell, whose Red Shoes is evoked on more than one occasion.
Shutter Island doesn’t totally escape the lead-footedness that’s marked some of Scorsese’s recent output. DiCaprio still can’t do period, and as in Revolutionary Road, his part cries out for a more imposing, classical leading man. His marshal is haunted by traumas from the war, and it’s intriguing to think about Shutter Island as taking a new angle on the very Scorsesean subject of guilt—the way it might have been portrayed in Freud-obsessed ’40s Hollywood. Proudly old-fashioned and yet utterly distinctive, this is a pleasing addition to a master’s oeuvre.
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