“Shutter Island” Review

 

What do we know about U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio)? Let’s start with what he knows about himself.

Teddy’s a working-class Boston boy. He served in the second World War, and was present for the liberation of Dachau. Later, he had a wife (Michelle Williams), but she died. These things haunt him. Also, he doesn’t like water, which might be an issue in a film called “Shutter Island.”

Now, in 1954, Teddy has a deferential new partner named Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), who seems strangely uneasy with a pistol and calls him “boss”

a lot, in spite of being older than him. Together they must track down a filicidal escapee from an insane asylum run by Ben Kingsley.

Ashecliffe, the place is called, which probably is not the most encouraging name, and it’s sequestered on a spooky, weatherbeaten island off the Massachusetts coast — a sort of Alcatraz east, with water on all sides (including above, when the hurricane comes), and much sinister readymade melodrama within.

Speaking of which, you might think: Who puts Ben Kingsley in charge of an insane asylum? Would you believe a former Nazi played by Max Von Sydow? But that’s the beauty of Martin Scorsese’s film of Dennis Lehane’s novel: its total willingness to go there. Even if the going will require a labyrinthine two and a half hours.

To be more precise, Ashecliffe is a hospital for the criminally insane, and whenever Teddy describes its inhabitants as prisoners or inmates, Kingsley’s silky medical director firmly corrects him. “Patients,” he says. Patience? Apparently there are more ways than one to see and hear things on shudder island. It’s the age of electroshock and atomic paranoia, and everyone seems to hope against hope — and against the tangible gloom supplied by production designer Dante Ferretti — that soothing revelations will be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Teddy confides to Chuck that he’s had his eye on this place — that the man responsible for his wife’s death might even be here. Then he starts getting awful headaches. His flashbacks seem increasingly like delusions, and his dreams start collapsing into each other. And just when he’s had enough of the hospital staff stonewalling his investigation, the missing patient conveniently turns up. Less conveniently, she turns up twice — first as Emily Mortimer, then as Patricia Clarkson.

Add to this the insinuation of some hellish HUAC brainwashing program, and the lighthouse of lobotomies, and unequivocal inmate Jackie Earle Haley raving portentously in the dungeon of Ward C, and warden Ted Levine threatening to eat our beleaguered hero’s eyeball, and you get…well, a bit of a mess, but a thrilling one to be sure. For all the stock shots of Teddy bolting upright into cold-sweat consciousness, his face lit by lightning, there’s the sense that any chance of ever being able to wake up from all of this has long since passed.

There’s also the sense of Scorsese quite enjoying a rather commercial exercise: the bestseller-based suspense thriller as Gothic horror noir throwback. Here he can run his own version of the playbook for ambitious filmmakers trumping up pulp — whether it’s working the likes of Ligeti into his soundtrack, à la Kubrick, or swimming among his influences and staging scenes as primers on tension-building, à la Tarantino.

The script is by Laeta Kalogridis, an “Avatar” producer who also wrote a couple episodes of that “Bionic Woman” revamp and co-wrote Oliver Stone’s “Alexander.” So those are some strange credentials. But it’s obvious that the real adapter here is the director, who finds filmic equivalents for even the most arguably gratuitous of Lehane’s lines, like, “The lights went on above them in a series of liquid cracks that sounded like bones breaking underwater.”

“Shutter Island” doesn’t reinvent any of the wheels it spins, but it wears its maker’s skills well enough. And it attests again to Scorsese’s faith in DiCaprio, who might appear implausible at first as a troubled Greatest Generation war veteran but ultimately delivers the requisite anguish in spades.

What we know about Teddy does evolve, but only according to what he knows about himself — which is at least enough to ask, “What would be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”