shutter island

I didn't get the chance to see Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island in theaters, which is unfortunate, because now that I've seen Inception I have to fight the urge to judge everything else by the high standards it sets. And it's unfair to Shutter Island to do that, because Shutter Island deserves to be judged on its own terms. The two are strikingly similar, but I'll try to refrain from comparing them; besides, Leonardo DiCaprio does a fair enough job of that here. I will say this: like Inception, Shutter Island only gets better upon reflection.

Possible light spoilers follow.

The film is set in the Boston Harbor area in 1954, in the midst of Cold War paranoia. DiCaprio's character, Edward "Teddy" Daniels, is a U.S. Marshal investigating the disappearance of a dangerous inmate from an asylum for the criminally insane on remote Shutter Island. The longer he and his partner stay on the island, though, the more they begin to feel like there's something else going on besides the simple case of a missing person. The staff are reluctant to answer their questions; the guards border on hostile. An ambiguous note (Who is 67?) found in the cell of the vanished inmate prompts Teddy to start digging deeper, questioning what exactly the asylum doctors are doing to their patients. As he digs, he experiences flashbacks to his own traumatic past -- his role in the liberation of Dachau, the death of his own wife. The possibility that his wife's killer, Andrew Laeddis, is present on the island causes him to question the real purpose of his visit -- is he part of some diabolical game that everyone else is somehow in on?

Shutter Island has many strengths, the foremost of which is probably DiCaprio's performance. He has the hardened-U.S.-Marshal part down perfectly, but balances it with a complex emotional side. The flashback dealing with his reaction to his family's death is particularly powerful. The mood Scorsese creates is fittingly disturbing and dream-like, almost Hitchcockian at times. How you interpret the message of the film depends a great deal on how you interpret the ending, but there is a moral either way. Whether that moral involves Andrew coming to terms with Truth and accepting the consequences of what he's done, or Teddy seeking to accomplish his mission and keep his sanity and his identity as a "good man," is left up to you.

In my opinion, Shutter Island's weaknesses are nearly all technical ones. The music at times fits the mood perfectly, or effectively helps create it, but at other times it's very jarring, practically forcing the mood onto the viewer. The quick-cut editing in some scenes feels odd and disrupts the flow. Shutter Island is not Scorsese's masterpiece, but it's definitely a top-notch thriller that further cements Leonardo DiCaprio's place as possibly the best actor of his generation.