It's so well made, the unsurprising twists end up deflating a visual masterpiece

Rating: 7/10 (21 June 2010)

Shutter Island (2010)
You know when a friend tells a story and includes lots of interesting details, and tells it really well so you listen to everything, and then they finish and you think, "And?"
There is a lot of that on Shutter Island. Martin Scorsese is a director who knows very much how to tell a story. And this movie, told so well, might become famous for having no punch line. It's not that the end is bad or illogical, or that getting there was so bad. Just the opposite. The end is heartwrenching and sensible, and the two hours getting there is fabulous stuff, great movie-making, and filled with all kinds of strange and beautiful moments.
So you have to realize this is more about being there than the actual story. It's a finely tuned work of art, really, as a visual experience, and with a fabulous score. Expect another solid, impassioned performance by Leonardo DiCaprio, along with a whole host of superb secondary acts. Even just the island with its cliffs and gloom and sprawling old brick buildings is creepy and fantastic. The characters on it, from the glaring cops with shotguns to the host of crazed and criminally insane people, are colorful to say the least, but not exaggerated.
Once you realize that the cunning Ben Kingsley is in charge or that Max von Sydow is possibly an ex-Nazi at the end of his life, you really pay attention. And then, as if this isn't enough, there begin flashbacks to World War II, and to a brutal murder, and other visions appear, including some really dreamy moments of magical realism. And you wonder how real it all is and whether it actually relates to the basic point of DiCaprio's being there as a federal marshal.
As usual with this kind of movie, the setting is a pastiche of places far apart, though all in the North East, including famous Peddocks Island in Boston Harbor (which is a park, not a prison). The horrible treatment of the German (and other) prison guards shown in the Dachau scenes has some basis in truth, but in fact was probably more sporadic and messier, and did not apparently involve a whole lineup of American shooters. You can look up the Dachau Massacre for details, but of course, the bigger (much bigger) massacre that is Dachau itself belongs to Nazi cruelty, and is represented with reasonable (if cinematic) fairness here, toning down (if anything) the gruesomeness. There is a long history of unethical experiments on mental patients held by the U.S. Government, though nothing I could find that involved this particular surgical option (by the government). Lobotomies (including those made with an ice-pick sort of instrument from the eye socket, into the brain, scrambling it up a bit) were still an option available to doctors in the 1950s, when this movie was made.
Still, I wouldn't take any of this movie as a history lesson. It simply layers up lots of real horrors with the imaginary ones of the fictional plot, which is pretty horrible, too. In all, we have a formal gem, a masterful construction that will dazzle and beguile your eyes and ears. But might leave you, as it has many viewers, wanting a little more for your own unscrambled brain, too.