Shutter Island

Enigmatic, Powerful and Disturbing
I tend to look for movies that draw me in and that provoke an emotional response. Martin Scorcese's "Shutter Island" did indeed draw me in, even though I found the film disturbing. Scorcese explores difficult questions of guilt, personal identity, and mind control.

The movie takes place in 1954 on a craggy, remote and forbidding island off the coast of Boston. (I have some familiarity with a United States possession called Navassa, an uninhabited, little-known island in the Carribean surrounded by steep, inaccessible cliffs and was reminded of Navassa by the movie.) Shutter Island serves as a hospital and prison for the criminally insane operated by the United States government. A United States Marshall, Teddy Daniels, and his ostensible partner, Chuck Aule, who calls Daniels "boss", are ferried to Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a female inmate who has apparently escaped. The inmate is said to have drowned her three children before her incarceration...

"Better to live as a monster or die as a good man?"
I think that some of the mixed things I'd heard about it come from the fact that some audiences were a) expecting something different and b) don't like to think. To be fair the studio mislead them by selling Shutter Island as a fun, edge of your seat, thrill ride. It's really a psychological drama disguised as a B grade horror movie. It indulges in all the gothic tropes: the isolated mental hospital, the hurricane that cuts everything off from civilization, hints of Nazi experiments, even the music plays into it. But really that's just the setting. If you take it as the whole thing, that's where you'll run into disappointment. It's more about what's happening in the mind of the main character- which is a puzzle in itself- than the big twist ending. I think that The Sixth Sense and others of it's ilk did a disservice to audiences in a sense. People look for the "trick" in movies, studios advertise the "big twist ending". But this isn't a movie about a twist. Yes, there's a big reveal...

A mind-bender from Martin Scorsese... Rewards multiple viewings!
It goes without saying that Martin Scorsese is an incredible filmmaker. He has added another classic to his resume with the mind-bending thriller, "Shutter Island". The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a federal marshal who is investigating the disappearance of a patient / prisoner from a mental institution for the criminally insane. DiCaprio shines in his part, perhaps brighter than he has in any other Scorsese film. He is accompanied by Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow, Ted Levine and Jackie Earle Haley, amongst others. "Shutter Island" does a great job of playing mind games with the viewer. This film makes for a great DVD to own, because you can watch it as many times as you would like and you can discover new clues in the plot over and over again. Also, after viewing the film the first time, once you know the outcome of the plot, subsequent viewings are really terrifying if you put yourself in the main character's shoes, knowing the ending. That's what I do when I...

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