"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.
A post-traumatic allegory whose potency is only deepened by its final turn of the screw, Shutter Island is most successful in manifesting physically the condition of emotional chaos and mental fracture. The climbing of stairs, haunting of corridors, and ominous succession of closed doors recall the dizzying despair of Vertigo and the internalized horror of The Shining; the sets and the location itself have all been devised to reflect a world -- a mind -- that has entrapped itself in a torment of unending mazes and unlightable corners. Teddy's motivations for taking the assignment at Shutter Island may be part of his search for closure: "I've had enough of killing. That's not why I'm here," he says, when it appears he has cause to seek revenge on a patient. "So what is this all about"? Chuck replies, the soul, as he is throughout, of empathic inquiry.
What it's all about tends to be delivered in big, barely digestible chunks of exposition and thesis-ese, which various characters are parachuted in to deliver. Teddy's encounters with many of these characters, including those played by Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Max Von Sydow and Ted Levine, have a more dream-like quality than his actual dreams. They say things like "That's the Kakfa-esque genius of it," and "If I were lean over and chew your eyeball out, would you be able to move quickly enough to stop me?" Wedged in between the crazy and the cliché of all of these exchanges is the constant plea for Teddy to let go of his dead wife -- an allusion to the film's portrait of the mid-century shift between barbaric and isolationist psychiatry to compassionate and talk-based care. "I can't," Teddy says. "Then you'll never leave this island," is the implied and then baldly stated reply.
What I couldn't escape is the feeling that Shutter Island is one of those films whose third act is meant not only to resolve but to fix the problems of the first two, and to an extent the gambit works. Those first two-thirds are more fun to think about afterwards than they are to sit through, and yet the confidence the structure presupposes -- that we will return to Shutter Island two or three times simply to mine its rich and referential mysteries -- is to be admired. Movies are our collective memory, as Scorsese loves to remind us, both in word and deed; should you find gaps in yours after a first, frenzied viewing of his latest, he'd be only too glad to refresh it.