9: SHUTTER ISLAND

Off the back of the Oscar and box office success that The Departed afforded him, the world waited a surprisingly long time for Martin Scorsese to follow up that Boston set crime thriller. What arrived was not what anyone expected, despite early indications that he would be staying in relatively similar terrain. Shutter Island is a Boston-set crime film in the literally loosest sense - in a similar way to A Scanner Darkly being science fiction – it is in fact, perhaps the closest the great director will come to ever making a horror.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in the most overlooked performance this year during the awards season, is Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels, assigned with the task of tracking down an escaped patient from a mental institution. The eponymous Shutter Island. Aided by a new partner he ventures onto the island and quickly discovers, surprise surprise, that nothing is as it seems.

Haunted by visions of his time during World War II, his dead wife and the man who killed her; Daniels tries to uncover the mystery of how the patient escaped. Time and time again everything we are set up to believe in is wrecked with the arrival of new information and throughout the genre whiplashes back and forward. This is all about plot, something Scorsese often tries to avoid in his films, and he seems to revel in refusing to accept whatever logic he has applied to the audience. It is pulp, unashamedly so, but in the hands of Scorsese it is masterful pulp.

The film ranks among the director’s most visually stunning works. Whether it is a long take of executed prisoners, the protagonist’s run up the stairs or merely a darkened corridor; every single shot is flushed full of daring that other thrillers would refuse to indulge in. They often choose instead to just have the story play out in front of the camera. Scorsese has never, in the entirety of his hugely accomplished career, allowed visuals to come before his characters; what he does do though, to great success, is integrate them into his stories. Here is no different. These visuals stand beside the characters complimenting each other.

Every character is burned into the brain whether they are the leads or present for only one scene. Notably in the third act, Ted Levine (best known for playing Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs) shares a scene with DiCaprio that is merely a conversation but is the most uncomfortable conversation you have ever witnessed. Character actors like Jackie Earle Haley, Elias Koteas and Emily Mortimer pull off similar feats where their one scene remains a pulling force throughout the rest of the running time.

Although this is DiCaprio’s film.

Never off-screen, his performance is the one of his career. For the longest time he has been an actor of considerable talent trying to dispel the image of himself on a sinking boat. This might just have been the film that eradicated that image. Whilst uglier than usual (although only ugly in comparison to DiCaprio’s general appearance the rest of the time) it is the character that dispels it. If the audience is expected to root for him, given his clean-cut public image, his actions are often very difficult to support. Arrogant observations and overlooking protocol evolve into at times shocking acts of violence - we realise that this character is difficult to empathise with or indeed support.

There are downsides to this film however that prevents the film from being regarded among Scorsese’s best works. The film doesn’t work on repeat viewings. The shocking twist that ends the film struggles to have the same impact when watching a second time instead, on repeat viewing, becomes a series of ‘spot the clue’ moments reducing the well constructed story to an irrelevance. To examine the film’s plot is like pulling at a loose string – only to see the whole thing fall apart around you. The film just is not as smart as it likes to think it is. As a one-off viewing though Shutter Island is last year’s best.