"There's No Moral Order As Pure As This Storm."

Rating: 9/10 (2 June 2010)

Shutter Island begins encircling us with the first sinister notes even under Paramount's logo. Like the ensuing film, they're menacing. This is Martin Scorsese's haunted house movie, given the insatiable quivering apprehension we sense when thrillers don't defuse all the suspense with action sequences. He's a master of accompanying image with music. This is one of his very most effective endeavors in music placement. He seizes the piano and strings of a minor piece by Mahler for every drop of its sensory character, waxes Kubrick with Penderecki's dissonant clusters, finds parallels with John Cage's hypnotic incoherence, the steady tonal pulse of Ingram Marshall.
Shutter is an obscure, jagged island off Boston, where a Civil War fort has been acclimated to a prison for the criminally insane. We close in by boat under descending skies with Marshals Teddy and Chuck, played by the strikingly symbiotic duo of Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo. They're to inspect the vanishing of a childkiller. There appears to be no way to escape the island alive. The evasion of one prisoner might not necessitate the involvement of Feds unacquainted with the circumstances, but we never question that element. Not after the foreboding enclosures of the prison appear, the investigators guided into the office of Dr. Cawley, played by Ben Kingsley with that ominous charisma he's gotten down cold in his career's latter half, continually deflecting all Gandhi-typecasting.
Experiencing the novel before the film was my mistake. It took four theater viewings to completely separate the two. The film's more lavish, much less concise than the unfolding, and especially closing, of the book, but there are stunning additions by Laeta Kalogridis that flood the film with thematic alarm bells, making it resonate more deeply and pensively than even the revelatory rattling of the novel. Scorsese chisels through the real world inch after inch. It's plain that Teddy has no notion of what he's getting into. The premise seems elementary: The woman's missing, Teddy and Chuck will search. But the frigid concrete walls ensnare them. The offices of Cawley and staff, equipped for war commanders, look thinly modernized from silent Fritz Lang or Robert Wiede films. Flashbacks convey Teddy's torturous experiences since WWII, which provided classic noir's bleak percussion. Shellshock could be seen in men struggling to appear self-assured in their veneers of undistinguished outfits, heavy smoking, fedoras worn low. DiCaprio and Ruffalo both assume this appearance. While Ruffalo purposely seems more like a disposition than a character, DiCaprio fittingly makes it feel more like a buoyant front.
DiCaprio commands some astonishing emotional scenes, modulating sharply between suspicion, aggression, bewilderment, agony. Had Paramount not postponed the release to a less Oscar-wary date, DiCaprio would doubtlessly be nominated. Indeed, the entire cast is outstanding in performances so unusual in substance. Many are figments, double-blinds, imposters, even mere functionaries. But all color Teddy's journey so dynamically. Michelle Williams effectively embodies a broken dream. Ted Levine inhabits an ominous duality as the Warden, who arguably may define the loonies-running-the-asylum cliché, but is he so loony? Maybe he's seeing more clearly than everyone else. Patricia Clarkson looks so unlike herself, possibly because her scene seems so convincing, yet so off-kilter. Emily Mortimer and Jeffrey Dean Morgan could be all Teddy's looking for, yet both baffle and intimidate him, and us.
There's a flashback merged with a dream that may be the closest Scorsese has ever brought me to tears. He uses Max Richter's tender strings, loss literally raining all around Teddy and the wife that'll only be real, in his arms, for another few moments. Scorsese's never done a scene remotely as surreal, or romantic, before. It's astounding seeing him extend his breadth into untapped territory. Indeed the film's foremost impact is on one's senses. It's a premonition of disquieting enigmas: How did this woman escape from a locked cell in a sealed ward, its panels able to endure cannons? Why do Cawley and the dubious Dr. Naering, played by 81-year-old Max Von Sydow---who I'd still dare not mess with---feel like they're lying? Why do the prison's practices spark Teddy's flashbacks to freeing Dachau? These sorts of wringers are at film noir's core. Characters never enter a noir without some major burden. They have unresolved dilemmas, submerged anguish. Nevertheless, why are the others so odd? Kingsley tastefully bleeds intimidation whenever he smiles, then mixes his signals with kindly etiquette so gracefully that he might as well be wiping off the menace with a silk handkerchief. Not to mention two supporting actors, most memorably psychopaths in Zodiac and The Silence of the Lambs, here play lawmen.
There's electrifying imagery in Shutter Island. There's a lighthouse, a cave on a cliff, dizzying falls to waves pounding on rocks below. A storm draws nigh. Light drips through clouds. The wind seems sorrowful. That's what the movie is: Ambiance, foreshadowing, the deterioration of Teddy's self-assurance, even selfhood. Scorsese induces pure dread, in various keys. Sculpting Robert Richardson's grandiose, angular, intensely colorful cinematography is Thelma Schoonmaker's trademark use of manipulated speeds, freeze-frames, those dang flashbulbs, as well as the ever more discriminating and poetic use of the cut from one shot to another that we always find in Scorsese's work.
Some either think the ending doesn't hold water or the movie building towards it doesn't. What would be more gratifying? Compared to other films with similar twists, Shutter Island is much more understated, without the urge to repeat earlier moments for redundant effect during the revelation, which instead is played gradually, dawning on us. This is all of a story, even the pieces that don't seem to click. One's inclination is to distinguish what goes before, and make rational deductions. However, what if you can't peg precisely what went before? What if there were concealed things about various characters? What if the movie's perspective isn't objective but splintered? Where can it all go? We wonder. So does Teddy.