Thoroughly entertaining despite far-fetched role-play plot

Rating: 6/10 (24 June 2010)

I have to liken 'Shutter Island' to another mystery-thriller: 'The Sixth Sense'. Both have a myriad of clues planted throughout the narrative, leading to a highly entertaining twist ending. I'll confess that I was pretty much fooled up until the climax but I did have my suspicions that things couldn't be what they seemed. At first, it seems that 'Shutter Island' is going to be a tale about some evil psychiatrists (aided and abetted by a corrupt staff) who are conducting secret experiments on a hapless population of psychiatric patients. Dr. Cawley (perfectly played by Ben Kingsley) does everything he can to stymie Federal Marshall Teddy Daniel's investigation including his refusal to hand over staff personnel folders. Before you know it, there are rumors that lobotomies are being performed at the lighthouse, on a different part of the island.
I became quite confused after the hurricane when Teddy and his partner Chuck (later revealed to be psychiatrist, Dr. Sheehan) are so easily able to walk into Ward C, where the most dangerous patients are housed. After all, if this was where all the really bad things were happening, wouldn't Cawley and his guards make it a point to prevent Teddy from learning Ward C's dark secrets? My best reasoning held that the marshals were able to slip into the off-limits area due to the confusion in the aftermath of the storm. But it didn't look right; the guards supposedly knew who Teddy was and they were simply letting him casually walk into the house of horrors where he does in fact learn that patients are being mistreated (i.e. lobotomized).
Was this simply an example of poor screen writing or was something more sinister afoot? As it turns out, Teddy's beliefs that everyone was out to get him on Shutter Island, was simply a paranoid fantasy. In fact, Teddy's 'investigation' was simply an elaborate role-play set up by Dr. Cawley, designed to break down Teddy's defenses. The ubiquitous Rachel Solando, who supposedly murdered her three children, was one of Dr. Cawley's staff members, pretending that she was a murderer in order to help Teddy realize that it was actually he who had murdered his wife after discovering that she had murdered their three children.
Because all of this calls for a great suspension of disbelief, Shutter Island ranks up there as a solid piece of film entertainment but holds it back from being considered a true 'artistic masterpiece' (as some have argued it is). There are three big problems with the film's narrative.
Firstly, there's a big assumption here that such role-playing could ever lead to such a huge improvement in a paranoid schizophrenic's psyche. Cawley and Sheehan concede that the role-playing can lead to a regression (as it did with Teddy nine months earlier, as they candidly admit). They call it a new "experimental therapy" but role-playing has been around for centuries. It looks awful nice how they get Teddy to confront his demons, but I would think that role-playing (as it's shown here) would tend to aggravate the patient, much more than it would lead to any kind of meaningful revelations.
That leads to the second problem: why would the Board of Overseers countenance such a therapy? After all, those are the guys who approve the lobotomies at the slightest hint of violence amongst the mentally ill population. Back in 1954, lobotomies were actually believed to be helpful for patients. Why would such do-gooders, such as Cawley and Sheehan, be given the chance to turn Teddy around? Not only don't I believe such people would be in charge of a Federal lock-up for the criminally insane but even if they were, they would not be allowed to conduct such a role-play experiment.
In reality such an experiment would place both the staff and the prison population in jeopardy. In a ridiculous scene, after Teddy bursts into the lighthouse, Cawley asks him, 'did you hurt the guard very badly?' In real life, he would never have been allowed to put any of the guards in jeopardy. Just imagine if Teddy actually had killed the guard by slugging him over the head with the rifle? And would Dr. Cawley allow his expensive European convertible to go up in smoke just to help the most dangerous patient on Stutter Island—simply out of the goodness of his heart?. I know he's a liberal but no one's that liberal when it comes to their own property that's worth so much money.
So without the role-play taking place, there's no twist ending and no accolades for Dennis Lehane, the author of the novel along with Director Martin Scorsese. Nonetheless, there's much to admire about this picture. Scorsese has a terrific way with camera angles. I love all the subtle closeups such as when the Dachau Commandant reaches for his gun, as he lays wounded in his office along with the old Victrola, with the record playing over and over. Scorsese sometimes overdoes things, especially with those scenes involving the murdered children at the end of the film (just a little too much blood for my tastes). All the performances are quite good here including Kingsley (as noted earlier) along with a very cool Max Von Sydow (who at first glance is supposed to be the bad guy but on second viewing, is quite benign).
Scorsese also smartly added the ambiguous line at the end suggesting that Teddy is cured but pretends to be insane since he can no longer live with the guilt of failing to save his children at the hands of his murderous wife.
This is the type of picture worth watching twice. The first time around you'll be in the dark; the second time you'll watch it for all the clues missed. But after that, there are no profound ideas here to sift through. In other words, an Ingmar Bergman film it ain't! But as a solid entertainment—it hits the mark!