In Theaters: Shutter Island

"You act like insanity is catching," Leonardo DiCaprio's Federal Marshal cracks in the opening minutes of Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's swollen Valentine to B-movie brain-benders of the noir and Hitchcockian schools. Before long, of course, we have reason to think it might be, and not only because the droning cello notes that accompany Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) on their journey to investigate the Ashecliff Asylum have escalated to a state of pure, keening hysteria before the duo even breach the gates. A simple assignment -- that of locating a missing patient amid a facility for the violently insane -- becomes tangled in psychological and pseudo-historical thickets so dense that one's own brain begins to scramble in the bid to maintain order.

The guards and orderlies at Ashecliff, a compound of institutions set on a heath-like island in the Boston Harbor, regard Teddy with wary hostility; the shackled patients on the grounds seem to take typically mad delight in his arrival. Both the cockeyed looks and googly eyes are addressed to the camera, and over the course of the first two hours we are indeed lodged deeply within Teddy's experience of Shutter Island. In forging this allegiance to the film's wet-eyed (and eventually wind-, rain-, fire- and pharmacology-whipped) protagonist a little too much is taken for granted. Lashing the viewer to Teddy's seemingly endless trials and taxonomies is a strategy that is only barely redeemed by the film's whaddayaknow big finish. A lumpy adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, there are many moments, particularly in the conspiracy-clogged second act, when Laeta Kalogridis's script is only barely held together by a combination of Scorsese's formidable command and the sheer, clothespin force of that magnificent furrow in DiCaprio's brow.

While being introduced to the asylum's suspiciously (or genuinely) sanguine head physician Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), who espouses Ashecliff's ethos as "a moral fusion between law and order and clinical care," Teddy flashes back to both tender moments with his deceased wife (a miscast Michelle Williams) and horrific memories of liberating Dachau as an American GI. These seeded images -- which take the shape of both flashbacks and dream sequences -- begin to grow in length and number until they threaten to merge with or otherwise crowd out Teddy's reality. Shot in hot, Technicolor contrasts (where the rest of the film is painted from a lustrous palette of earth- and metal-tones), they are lodged somewhat awkwardly into the main narrative, their portentous style creating an effete distance between the tormented lead character, rather than even an illusion of intimacy. Ultimately they seem cut from celluloid -- a movie's idea of a flashback -- rather than inspired by an actual psychology.

Pages: 1 2