Psychophagy 101.

Rating: 6/10 (23 June 2013)

It's well directed by Scorsese, nicely photographed, the locations and photography are convincing. Very atmospheric. It's the kind of storm that would send me scurrying to the cellar.
But I'm beginning to wish M. Night Shyamalan had never turned "The Sixth Sense" into a successful movie, in which you can't tell the living people from the flashbacks from the ghosts from the hallucinations from the dreams.
I was puzzled by the ghosts (or whatever they were) in "The Shining." Here's Jack Nicholson, heretofore troubled but sane, strolling into the deserted ballroom of the Overlook Hotel, slapping his hands on the bar, and saying with a big, welcoming grin, "Well, HELLO, Lloyd! How's business tonight?" And the accommodating bar tender suddenly appears and replies politely. Well, we know Lloyd isn't really there. Is he one of Nicholson's hallucinations? After all, Jack calls him by name. But later there are ghosts with masks on that Jack has absolutely nothing to do with. I'll tell you, it's a conundrum. The mind boggles.
"Shutter Island" has the same problem in spades. It's completely bewildering through most of its length. I finally caught up with it in the last five or ten minutes. It's even more confusing because the staff of the psychiatric hospital in which DeCaprio is a patient are playing roles that coincide with DeCaprio's delusions. Mark Ruffalo, whom I like, for instance, is in reality DeCaprio's primary psychiatrist but he's playing the role of DeCaprio's partner in the U. S. Marshall Service. The whole hospital is organized around DeCaprio's psychosis -- just to see if going along with his paranoia will somehow cure it.
It's a nifty premise, but like the notion behind "The Game," it's not just improbable. It's impossible. "The Game" was kind of enjoyable because it had its small comic moments but Scorsese clearly means this story to be tragic. "Which is better," DeCaprio asks his partner/psychiatrist at the end, "to be a living monster or to die like a hero?" In other words, DeCaprio seems to realize he has a choice. He can accept reality and be the monster -- he murdered his wife. Or he can submit to a lobotomy and, somehow, go on being the innocent hero of the U. S. Marshalls that he once was.
That lobotomy business is pretty aptly described, by the way. The operations began in the 1930s and António Egas Moniz, a Portugese neurologist, won the Nobel for using and describing the operation. Mostly it was a last resort and sometimes it worked, though with side effects. It was more or less discontinued after the discovery of anti-psychotic meds in the 1950s. If DeCaprio wants to go on living as a hero, he probably makes the right choice in choosing a lobotomy. It didn't usually rid the patient of his symptoms. It just calmed him down so he didn't act on them. DeCaprio will probably still think he's a federal agent but what remains of his personality will be a bloody stump and he won't care if they let him off the island or not.