Shutter Island film review: marred by the saw-it-coming syndrome

by Luke Buckmaster
After treating audiences to new-fangled old-school gangster shenanigans in the slashing The Departed (2006), legendary ‘movie brat’ director Martin Scorsese returns to the somewhat less laudable genre of what-was-he-thinking cinematic experiments with Shutter Island. This retro remote location spook-fest has a sublimely eerie atmosphere – you can always rely on Scorsese to paint some pretty pictures – but is hamstrung by a problematic screenplay, which incongruously culminates with one of the most predictable “surprise” twists associated with this breed of so-called psychological storytelling.

The last decade has been patchy for Scorsese, with the muddled historical fiction of Gangs of New York (2002), the cold, dispassionate portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004) and the nightmarish vision of a singing and dancing skeleton aka Mick Jagger and his over-the-hill entourage in Shine a Light (2008). Aside from The Departed, Scorsese’s made-for-TV Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home was his major saving grace.

It’s obvious from the early, striking, Shining-esque moments of Shutter Island that this is going to be an old-fashioned thriller – a label that unfortunately applies not just to the period style through which it is told but to the passé final “revelation” the audience are asked to absorb, as if they couldn’t possibly have seen it coming.

The year is 1954 and U.S. marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are summoned to a remote island where a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane is masterminded by the calm wisdom contained within the shiny skull of Ben Kingsley, who plays the seemingly compassionate but not entirely co-operative Dr Cawley.
A murderer has escaped from her cell and no one can figure out how. Daniels – the hard-nosed, straight-talkin’ type – starts sniffing around the tracks, interviewing inmates and staff while grappling with his own problems – namely coming to terms with traumatic flashbacks to WWII and strange dreams about his ex-wife Dolores (Michelle Williams). With DiCaprio’s ever-boyish looks it’s a smidge difficult to believe his character is old enough to experience wartime atrocities, even if the film is based only a decade after the end of the war, but that grievance feels infinitesimally minor compared with what is coming up: a twist 101 ending that was always going to goad sceptical audiences into a fresh round of Scorsese bashing.

The ever-bold filmmaker layers Shuttle Island with atmospheric aplomb, combining a thudding score and superb set detail with moody, heavily stylised use of colour. The technical properties do not disappoint. There is a sublimely twisted dream sequence in which Dolores’s sweat and tears drip into a pool of blood on the floor as the ashes from her singed body rain down in the room, and a bone-chilling tracking shot of mass execution at a POW camp. Some of the dialogue is also right on the money – particularly a spooky exchange between Daniels and a panicked crazy woman (Patricia Clarkson) that takes place in a cave off a rocky cliff face guarded by thousands of scurrying rats.

DiCaprio is terrific as Daniels, a performance concocted as a mixture of fear, bravery, pig-headedness and inner turmoil. When the character’s memories and present-day reality begin to merge, audiences will begin to suspect that some kind of narrative trickery is afoot – and this is about the point at which this should-have-been-great thriller becomes a point of divisiveness and debate. Champions of the film may argue that carrying on about the ultra predictable twist may be missing the point – but in the context of narrative sleights such discussion is par for course.

Attempting to implement a surprise ending is always risky business. Audiences are instinctively hostile when they cotton on to the idea that a storyteller is playing intellectual funny buggers with them, that crucial information is being deliberately withheld. If the viewer picks the twist too early, and/or the filmmaker invests too heavily in it, the experience as a whole can be soured if the person watching believes they’re two steps ahead of the characters and therefore intellectually superior to the storyteller. The end of The Shining is a fine example of a well implemented twist: the final revelation is articulated in the very last shot, after the story has succeeded or failed on its own merits.

Not so for Shutter Island. A considerable portion of the final act is devoted to explaining to the audience what we more or less knew anyway, what we saw coming as sure as light is day and dark is night. Coupled with regular insinuations beforehand that there is something we don’t know, it’s an unsatisfying resolution to a largely well-told story. A bit of ambiguity, or a double twist ending, might have saved it. No such luck.

Shutter Island’s Australian theatrical release date: February 18, 2010