Viewers who like musical theater as much as they do movies will see "
Valentine's Day" and think of the song from "Damn Yankees" that goes "You've gotta have heart/ All you really need is heart." Of course you need more than that, in fact the brain makes the rest of us function, including the ticker. The brain is the computer, the heart is merely the software. In "Shutter Island" director Martin Scorsese pays at least as much homage to the brain as did Garry Marshall for the heart. Scorsese, employing Laeta Kalogridis's screenplay from Dennis Lehane's potboiler novel, uses the great Leonardo DiCaprio to explore the dimensions of what's upstairs, examining it from both the standpoint of a healthy organ and that of a diseased one. In doing so, he rivets the audience to their respective seats, conjuring up thoughts of old movie veterans who thrilled to Anatole Litvak's 1948 movie "The Snake Pit," about a woman who winds up in an asylum for the insane without knowing how she got there.
SHUTTER ISLAND
Paramount Pictures
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written By: Laeta Kalogridis based on Dennis Lehane's novel
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Max Von Sydow
Screened at: Paramount, NYC, 2/16/10
Opens: February 19, 2010
In a story that's loaded with twists and turnabouts, Scorsese takes us into the mind and body of Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), a veteran of World War II who is among the soldiers liberating Dachau. (The Dachau concentration camp in Germany did have a sign "Arbeit Macht Frei," but what appears to have been photographed by Robert Richardson here looks suspiciously like the one hovering over Auschwitz in Poland.)
With a tale that is set up to find a large audience rather than simply the arthouse crowd, "Shutter Island" takes us to a lonely atoll outside Boston harbor (actually filmed in the Medfield Hospital which was abandoned during the 1960s). Federal marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have been assigned to the island to help locate Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson), a runaway patient committed for murdering her children who escaped barefoot, a woman described by Daniels as a "prisoner" but who is regularly corrected by the institution's chief psychiatrist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) who appears genuinely to care for his "patients." A severe hurricane prevents a return from this Ashecliffe Hospital across the eleven miles back to Boston. The federal officials are required to hand over their guns to deputy warden McPherson (John Carroll), who warns that Ward C is where the most violent people are housed. Guess where Daniels winds up visiting?
Director Scorsese, near the top of his form, provides Daniels with frequent flashbacks, nightmares and hallucinations mostly of his dead wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), who perished in a fire started by a maintenance man, George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley).
DiCaprio comes across with a powerful performance, dominating the film with his bravado, the vulnerabilities that arise from his nightmares, the near-paranoid ideas evoked from the Cold War ambiance (it's 1954). Here is a man who could presumably be saved had the cell phone been invented at the time but who is stuck on an island, snooping about, even risking his life climbing dangerous cliffs with strong current crashing against the sharp rocks—all designed to make the doctors believe that the escaped patient must have died. A dependable Mark Ruffalo provides DiCaprio with a foil, a guy who does not take himself so seriously, who regularly calls the other marshall "boss," and who allows the chief marshall to ask most of the questions. Some of the interviews that Daniels has with the mental patients are surprising, particularly one with a woman who claims to "have a dark side" but who actually in a perfectly normal manner during the discussions.
The production design is elegantly scary evoking a Hitchcockian atmosphere with Thelma Schoonmaker music bringing tensions to a fever point particularly in the opening scenes thanks to the artistry of composers from Gustav Mahler to John Cage. The ensemble performs beautifully under Scorsese's chilling direction, the 138-minutes' running time fully justified.
SHUTTER ISLAND (Paramount Pictures)
Rated R. 138 minutes. © 2010 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
