A Heartbreaking Character Study Masquerading as a Mystery

Rating: 9/10 (14 April 2010)

I watched Shutter Island a few hours ago and I'm shocked to imagine that I almost missed it on the theaters. The trailer made it look like a modern horror movie: full of silly jump scenes, dissonant music, grainy cinematography, fast editing. I found the trailer so disgusting to look at, I nearly missed the movie.
Well, I'm glad I watched it after all, because I wouldn't hesitate to consider it a modern masterpiece. It's also the best Martin Scorsese movie I've seen by him since Casino.
The movie, a mystery set in 1954, follows US Marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck, as they arrive at Shutter Island, a desolate place that holds a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Their original mission is to find a patient who disappeared, but Teddy has a secret mission: he believes Shutter Island is keeping sinister secrets, involving experiments on the patients. And he took the mission to get on the island and gather evidence to prove it.
To reveal more would spoil the movie.
In recent years Martin Scorsese seems to have been making only Oscar bait - his historical epics, Gangs of New York and The Aviator were clear attempts at getting the prized statuette, and it's ironic that it was his least ambitious, more banal movie to date, The Departed, that finally got him an Oscar. But it seems that it released him from this obsession and he has gone back to making great movies without Oscar concerns. Shutter Island is his first movie in a long time to make a good combination of plot and character, and use pacing in an exciting way, drawing the viewer into the story slowly but hypnotically.
Leonardo DiCaprio has improved a lot in recent years, taking more interesting projects. In Shutter Island he gives a great performance as Teddy, an ex-soldier who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, haunted by the horrors of the Holocaust, who became a US Marshall only to be hit by a tragedy in his own country. His face and body language, but especially his eyes, transmit the pain of a man who's seen too much and suffered too much and yet continues to cling to life. Although the movie starts as a mystery, it's in fact a character study of Teddy.
The supporting cast is just as good: Mark Ruffalo is hit and miss for me, but here he hit it as Teddy's likable partner, Chuck. Ben Kingsley gives a great performance too as Dr. Cawley, a man who radiates nothing but caring for his patients and yet Teddy thinks there's something evil in him. Max Von Sydow, with less screen time than any of the others, is also perfect as a truly sinister doctor.
The rest of the movie is in the hands of Scorsese's usual team: Thelma Schoonmaker, Dante Ferretti, Francesca Lo Schiavo and Sandy Powell. I loved the cinematography throughout the movie, every shot was so well framed, so elaborate, the movements so fluid and unusual. I was quite happy to learn it was Robert Richardson (Platoon, JFK, The Aviator) in charge of the cinematography: he's one of the best DPs working in Hollywood nowadays.
Another aspect that captured my attention was the music; it seemed so fit for each scene I was amazed to discover none of it had been composed for the movie. I especially loved the use of Max Richter's music in it; he composed one of the best scores I've ever listened to - Waltz With Bashir - and his non-film music can be quite good too. The piece used, On The Nature Of Daylight, was one of my favorite tracks in the movie.
Shutter Island is an exciting, tense, and heartbreaking movie. Leonardo DiCaprio made Teddy Daniels such a likable person, the ending might leave some people sad over his fate. It's not death, but this movie shows that there are things worse than death in this world. And perhaps that's the best praise I can give this movie, that it shows new types of horrors we're not accustomed to think about. For that, Martin Scorsese and everyone involved in Shutter Island deserve a lot of praise.