Movie Review for "Shutter Island"

Shutter Island

The burden of the past and the impotence facing reality are motifs for Scorsese's incursion into suspense.

Shutter Island is a feature film absolutely apart in the filmography of Martin Scorsese. He is often regarded as one of the greatest directors of North American cinema alive, especially for his movies about gangsters and the mafia world. Here there is a grim thriller, a haunting psychological drama. Although it has many elements in common with some of his greatest classics, Scorsese risks in a relatively unexplored territory if compared to his past features, daring to flirt more directly with the style of Alfred Hitchcock and the genre of film noir, at this adaptation of the book written by Dennis Lehane.

Renowned for its lasting partnerships, as the ones he had with Harvey Keitel, Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, Shutter Island is already his fourth movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, whose talent he attributes to the fact that he continues to make movies so productively. At his best as a dramatic actor, DiCaprio lives the disturbed detective federal police Teddy Daniels, sent to Shutter Island, the remote island that gives the title to the film, where he runs the strangest prison for sociopaths, a maximum security mental hospital that would make the psychiatric hospital of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) seems like a naive kindergarten. Along with his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo, in good performance), he goes to the isolated area in order to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of a dangerous killer, accused of killing her own children. Memories of the detective past life will surface, and this is just the starting point of a complex plot that will become increasingly exciting and unsolvable.

There is a conspicuous use of the soundtrack as an artifice to create fear and suspense, something that will refer directly to Alfred Hitchcock’s films. The dissonant arrangements of brass session create the climax, and very reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann's work (the composer Hitchcock frequently collaborated with). The plot takes place in the 50’s, and so all the costumes, hats and overcoats and all detective duo's antics are following a re-creation of many archetypes of Hollywood's Golden Age: DiCaprio is presented as a typical film noir character very reminiscent of the detective played by Glenn Ford in The Big Heat (1953); Ruffalo talks in a fastidiously way, true to Marlon Brando as a young man. In addition, everything is carefully designed to recreate the atmosphere of that time, and the picture matches perfectly to the environment of light and shadows typical of the genre. Scorsese never cease on making references to the history of cinema on his films, and here is not different. Most notable is the shot that shows DiCaprio in the shower, a scene in the bath as seen in Psycho (1960).

Despite the fact that it constantly refers to the aura of some of the most emblematic thriller films of the past, however, it is undeniable that Shutter Island shows some similarities and commercial appeal as seen in contemporary suspense cinema style - M. Night Shyamalan included. Absolutely absurd turning points, psychological mazes, a constant mix of delusion and reality and at the end a final revelation, tremendously shocking, a climax which gives a new meaning to the whole story, and often highly ambiguous. It would be surprising if there were not something formulaic in terms of script, but Scorsese’s newest tale is undeniably incendiary and able to fully take the attention of the viewer until the last minute. Yet despite a more commercial content of Shutter Island, it is misleading to think the new yorker director would fall into a simple genre formula. On the other hand, the plot serves as a background to a much deeper and comprehensive debate of what may initially assume.

At first, the time when the story takes place: 1954 is the epicenter of the years that followed the end of World War II, where the world still resented the greatest catastrophe ever caused by humanity itself. How to get on with life, knowing that the carnage and guilt are still so present in the collective unconscious and imagination? How to keep living with the images of extermination in mind, the Holocaust, when the memory of dead bodies in concentration camps still so fresh in the memory? The impact of that has changed the world, and that is the real central theme of Shutter Island.

There was a new revolution coming up, and a new generation of young people wanting, even unconsciously, to deny all the past and the existing cultural tradition. What was in vogue in the cinema of that period was precisely the impotence of man before the horror and the new order that was taking over the world. The cinema of the time was absolutely focused on this idea, from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1958) to On The Waterfront (1954), through several Nicholas Ray’s films. It's just about the insecurity of the post-war that Hitchcock is based, who put James Stewart precisely as a former heartthrob and greatest symbol of the "good American citizen" in the role of a limited and insecure police in Vertigo (1958), the film that obviously is the major influence for Shutter Island. In this great classic of the British director, the detective finds himself helpless after becoming aware of his own inability to face reality, carrying the guilt and the paralyzing trauma for letting a person die innocently.

Shutter Island also discusses the cultural role of the atomic bomb in the twentieth century. One of the biggest responsible for the youth revolution in the world, the ubiquitous possibility that the planet would explode and end up in dust all of a sudden, promoted the springboard for an anarchic impetus to enjoy life here and now, encouraging reckless and insane behavior, something that culminated in the development of counterculture and even new drugs (whether psychotropic or hallucinogenic) and its abuse – rock and roll, for instance, just appeared in the year in which the plot takes place in time. The launch of TV, mentioned by the characters of the asylum as "the voices that invade your world", enhanced the increasingly debatable about individual identity (the ideas of Wilhem Reich were getting popular at that time), since human behavior became increasingly influenced by behavioral revolutions. Who am "I" in this new world full of new realities?

It is ironic that Martin Scorsese, who is a great scholar, a film historian, has opted for a project with this specific purpose after breaking a cycle of more than three decades when finally won the Oscar, a burden that he carried throughout his career. Shutter Island seems his reckoning with the past, that he made up with film industry. A movie made without awards pretension, guided only by his passion for cinema. He who went from a promising independent talent, was in the very forefront of the great American cinema in the 70s, and today is a veteran of the studios that with this film seeks a new identity and freshness. Shutter Island may arise to exorcise the image of a director who only makes movies about the mafia. If the burden of the past allows.