Insanity reigns, or should I say rains, in “Shutter Island,” Martin Scorsese’s waterlogged ode to the cinematic joys of mental illness.
Clearly, he’s crazy about this stuff. And you feel that love in every beautifully rendered shot of his admirably understated tale of bedlam inside an isolated Massachusetts state hospital for the criminally deranged.
From the costumes to the sets to the acting, everything is sick, as in mad good. Well, everything but the preposterous story supporting it all.
To call Laeta Kalogridis’ adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel loony only begins to describe how way, way out there “Shutter Island” gets with its dabblings into 1950s paranoia.
It’s certainly ambitious, though, tossing in allusions to the Holocaust, Red Scare and unethical medical experiments, as it attempts to solve the mysterious disappearance of a patient committed after killing her three young children.
Sent to find her are two federal marshals played superbly by Mark Ruffalo and Scorsese’s muse, Leonardo DiCaprio. Together, they provide an appealing conduit into a clandestine world of shadowy figures and nefarious agendas. And those are just the people running the place.
You’re intrigued from the moment Ruffalo’s Chuck Aule and DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels step onto a ferry and journey out to the far reaches of Boston Harbor to a tiny ominous land mass called Shutter Island.
It is a world in and of itself with its own set of rules and a governing body led by Ben Kingsley’s Dr. Cawley and Max Von Sydow’s ex-Nazi, Dr. Naehring.
Excising pain is their aim, as they empty a bag of archaic psychiatric tricks on a motley crew of patients, including a marvelous Jackie Earle Haley. Unfortunately, for him and his fellow inmates, it’s 1954, a time when shackles, lobotomies and rudimentary cages are all the rage when it comes to “curing” the criminally insane.
No wonder Rachel Solando has gone missing. But where could she possibly run to while trapped on a desolate island that could pass for Alcatraz.
The gray area between reality and delusion is precisely the point of both Lehane’s novel and Scorsese’s movie. And it’s interesting up to a point, especially the way Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson (“The Departed”) bathe the entire production in an intoxicating dream-like haze.
As the story slogs along well past the two-hour mark, however, you begin to lose patience with all the mind trips Scorsese insists on playing. Instead of creating thrills and suspense, as intended, these tricks start leading you to believe that they are just that, tricks, all carefully assembled to mask a story that doesn’t begin to hold up to scrutiny.
USA —
