REVIEW: Unsettling 'Shutter Island' shows Scorcese's genius

GRADE: A-

SHUTTER
ISLAND

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams

Director: Martin Scorsese

Theaters: Hollywood, Tisneltown, Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark

Rated: R (for disturbing violent content, language and some nudity)

Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes

Sometimes the sign of a master artist is not how he produces a product of bracing originality, but how he interprets a long-established genre. In tackling “Shutter Island,” only his second thriller since the 1991 remake of “Cape Fear,” Martin Scorsese, who is a master artist in the eyes of even the most jaded cynic, takes a type of story familiar to all of us and dresses its decidedly ghoulish Hitchcockian bones in something gossamer and graceful.

The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose reputation extends far beyond his Boston office, is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Shutter Island’s fortress-like Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. What his brand new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) doesn’t know is that Daniels has wanted for years to get onto the island, for reasons only he knows.

As the hospital’s doctors (including Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow) attempt to derail his investigation at every turn and a torrential hurricane cuts off all communication with the outside world, Daniels and Aule uncover a sinister plot, hatched by the U.S. government, to unleash radical, monstrous treatments on their patients for ominous ends. Given what he knows, Daniels realizes there is no way they’re ever going to let him off the island. At least not without a fight.

Antiseptic and clinical, “Shutter Island” is, infantile as it sounds, akin to the sensation of settling onto a toilet seat that is shockingly, unexpectedly and uncomfortably frigid. Fundamentally coursing with primal paranoia, the over-the-top film has more than a little B-movie DNA. It evokes the specificity of time and place, one haunted by the past horrors of World War II and terrified by the future horrors of an atomic age.

Overwrought and sensationalistic, the pulpy, modern story would not be unrecognizable to Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters or any writer of Gothic fiction. The source here is a novel by Dennis Lahane, whose books “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby, Gone” have also been turned into superlative films.

Everything about “Shutter Island” is menacing. Even when nothing apprehensive appears onscreen, Scorsese employs his bombastic, portentous score to make it so. The result is deeply unsettling, creating a heightened state of suspense that will not release its grip until halfway through the ride home.

The music in the film — not a traditional score, but a collection of dense tonal clusters and stalking postminimalism by several artists, including Ingram Marshall and Krzysztof Penderecki (the latter of whose work also appeared in “The Exorcist,” “The Shining,” “Children of Men” and numerous David Lynch films) — is itself, like Jonny Greenwood’s work for “There Will Be Blood,” a three-dimensional character.

Scorsese has a trick up his sleeve in “Shutter Island,” a twist that allows him to get away with just about anything. The reason some scenes don’t quite work, feel too convenient or contrived, or fail to pass rational muster, is readily apparent by the end. That Scorsese swings for the fence, even when he knows such actions make us question his artistic sagacity, is all the more appreciated come the film’s twisted dénouement.

“Shutter Island” is certainly one of Scorsese’s trippiest films, impenetrable for large swaths and, at times, deeply unpleasant to visit. It is a universe of dreadful visions and convoluted labyrinths, in which prisons of stone and iron are no match for the prison of the mind, and where no moral order is purer than that of chaste violence.

“Which is worse,” a character asks at the end of the film, “to live as a monster or die as a good man?”

It is a question Martin Scorsese will answer with consummate skill, controlled dread and more than a little dark magic.