Great Scorsese.

Rating: 10/10 (28 February 2011)

I've seen this movie twice now. This review is my opinion of the movie. Obviously I had no hand in the production. Nor can I read minds on what the makers did hope to show and/or accomplish with this motion picture. And it is a motion picture.
One we've seen in different spaces and different places so many times before. We can relate the story to other templates we know. Troubled but capable man solves mystery. Then we find out he has a closer tie to the mystery than we originally imagined.
The year is 1954. Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Marshal. His newest case is on an isolated island. A mental institution is housed within the Civil War era buildings. The mystery Teddy is here to solve is simple. A woman who drowned her kids escaped the prior night. It becomes more complicated when we learn that her cell was locked from the outside, and she left without even a pair of shoes. As Teddy muses "We haven't heard the truth once yet." Teddy is a WW2 veteran. He helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp. He killed a lot of people in the war. His wife, as we learn early, died in a fire. It was the smoke that got her, not the fire. The escape didn't take place at any regular institution. This is Aschliff Asylum for the criminally insane. These are the 'patients' that no other facility can handle. They've harmed or murdered before.
Teddy's only friend is the partner he only met on the ferry onto the island, Chuck. Teddy trusts Chuck enough to let him know that he requested this case specifically. Teddy's wife didn't just die in a fire. It was arson. Andrew Laeddis, the man who set the fire. got away with it. He's finally sentenced to prison for burning down a school, but gets transferred to Ashcliff, then disappeared. Teddy is there to find him. Not to kill him. No. Teddy's had enough of killing. He wants to uncover what's really going at Ashcliff. Because prisoners don't just disappear, and Teddy's informant has told him of dangerous surgeries done in secrecy. Teddy is there to blow the lid off this place.
Tortured dreams of his wife haunt his nights. But she's leading him. Telling him the arsonist is alive and somewhere on Shutter Island. Teddy saw things in the war. Horrible world-breaking things. He lost his wife.
Shutter Island is his chance. From my own service overseas and the loss of loved ones in my life, Teddy's journey was mine. I want him to succeed so much. He's got a mystery here to solve and it's not an escaped patient. There's more going on. In the end Teddy can't succeed. There are two scenes in this movie that stand out as some of the best filmmaking has to offer. Teddy's first dream sequence and his conversation with the wonderful Jackie Earle Haley as George Noyce. In that scene, Noyce tells Teddy that he has to let go of his late wife or he'll never get off this island.
I knew he wouldn't. I knew he couldn't. I know he'd spend the rest of his life on that island from the beginning. I know because I'm stuck on my own Shutter Island. I wish it really was as simple as finding Andrew Laeddis. I wish it were as simple as blowing the lid of the place. But as Teddy discovered, Andrew Laeddis is the last thing we want to find.