Shutter Island

Theisland rises like a prehistoric behemoth from the fog of Boston harbor, a rockyAlcatraz set in cold, swirling tides and accessible only by a choppy ferryride. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Islandis confined to that rock, a steeply pitched, wooded wilderness occupied by afortress-like federal asylum for the criminally insane and the mysteriouslighthouse the facility’s patients fear.

U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels(Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) arrive on the island toinvestigate the strange disappearance of one of its inmates. Seems that a womanconvicted of murdering her three children simply vanished inside her cell, aroom with barred windows and a door locked from outside. The foot draggingasylum staff is headed by Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and backed up by a force ofheavily armed guards. “You act like insanity is contagious,” Daniels quips,film noir style. The guard only smirks.

Shutter Island is an ambitious adaptationof the novel by Dennis Lehane, the author of Mystic River.Set in 1954, Shutter Islandowes something to the Hollywood detective andmental illness dramas of that period. The asylum is clearly a snake pitatleast the restricted wing that reverberates with the screams of madness.Although Daniels and Aule are wisecracking cops in fedora hats and loud ties,something’s a bit off. Aule seems entirely too glib and Daniels is a damagedman. He feels responsible for the death of his wife, who communicatesunsettling warnings about the island in his dreams. And the asylum with itsgothic gate and electric fence reminds him of the Nazi death camp he liberatedat the end of the war.

Nothingis as it seems in Shutter Island;every puzzle reveals a new twist. At the center of the labyrinth looms theambiguous figure of Dr. Cawley; a suave performance by Kingsley endows thetweed-suited mandarin with erudition, a vaguely cosmopolitan accent and aprofession of humanitarian concern. He claims to be against lobotomizing anddrugging the inmatesperhaps he’s an old school Freudian committed to talkinghis patients through their trauma. But maybe he has allowed himself to becomethe master of a trauma in a hallucinogenic land of nightmare?

Shutter Island is an intriguing mysterywhose solutions are slippery at best. It rambles on for 20 minutes too long, asif no one in the production could summon the courage to tell Scorsese: “enoughalready!” The screenplay is less than pitch perfect in terms of its historicalsetting, but minor flaws don’t entirely diminish the overarching concept of theshadowy asylum island and some brilliant cinematic moments, especially thedreams that haunt Daniels’ sleep and follow him into his waking hours.