Lesser Scorcese film fails to satisfy

Rating: 6/10 (13 January 2011)

Before I get into the spoilers, I'll just say this is an initially intriguing movie with a great performance by Michelle Williams and a great, brief performance by Ted Levine. It is beautifully filmed but overlong and predictable.
********** SPOILERS BELOW ************** Shutter Island begins well. It has an eerie quality to it that at first suggests it will be some sort of horror movie. In fact, it is filmed as such all the way through, with spooky whispering and dark places and dripping blood. But it is not a horror movie, and much of the problem with Shutter Island is that the tone does not fit well with what the movie actually is.
The movie starts out as detectives Teddy and Chuck come to an asylum for the criminally insane to find a missing patient. How did she escape, why didn't she take her shoes, why are the doctors uncooperative? Interesting questions, but it soon seems there is something more than this going on. Doctors make odd comments and give odd looks. Teddy has weird dreams and headaches. Doctors or patients sometimes say something that oddly suggests they know something about Teddy's life they shouldn't know. Early on, you realize that there is either some conspiracy involving the asylum or that Teddy is perhaps insane.
At a certain point in the movie, it is clear that it is the latter. When Teddy tells his partner that HUAC, the anti-communist organization, is funding medical experiments, it was clear to me that Teddy was a paranoid-schizophrenic. And almost everything in the movie past that point fit with that being the case.
The problem is, the movie keeps playing along with Teddy long after it's obvious he's crazy. There have been very good movies, like A Beautiful Mind and Repulsion, that gave the audience a peak into mental illness, but they didn't try to toy with the audience as long as Shutter Island does. By the time it becomes clear that Teddy is insane, the movie needed to have ready a twist to reframe everything we saw. Instead, Teddy continues with his investigation. It is not until the very end that the reveal happens, and while it adds some interesting details and offers alternate interpretations of previous events, it is too little too late.
A twist only works if you're not expecting it. If you're waiting for it, and waiting for it, and it doesn't come, it's just kind of boring.
I was surprised to discover when I came to this site that a small number of people take Teddy's story at face value, insisting he was sane and driven crazy by the doctors. This makes absolutely no sense, but perhaps it's a result of people not being able to accept that genius Martin Scorcese made a rather obvious, unexceptional movie.
Visually impressive, with some nice scenes and good performances (Williams is awesome as the dead wife), Shutter Island is still overlong and underwhelming. I wish Scorcese had just gone ahead and made the simple thriller I thought was coming instead of this psychological muddle.