***** Shutter Island (2010)Allow me to mull over one of the key scenes in Shutter Island. Teddy Daniels (Leonardo Di Caprio) is having hallucinations. He sees his dead wife (Michelle Williams) in their old apartment building and she's telling him where to find the arsonist who took her life. The apartment is littered with falling ashes, Teddy's wife's flowery dress is stained with blood and music haunts the background as it's being played from an old phonograph. Teddy, stricken with grief, attempts to coddle his wife, only to have her disintegrate into ash (and literally slip through his fingers).
A display of style? Absolutely. But only Scorsese (repeat, only Scorsese) can make a scene like the one mentioned above an integral element of mood and character without making it seem like an exercise in flourish. The word restraint is just not in this man's cinematic vocabulary. He genuinely loves filmmaking and his passion is clearly evident in his latest feature.
The premise is straightfoward enough: two U.S. marshals (DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) are sent to a mental hospital in order to locate a missing person. The hospital, which resides on a remote island, is an asylum for the nation's most volatile insane criminals (or patients, as Dr. Crawley, played by Ben Kingsley, so emphatically argues they should be called). Conspiracies and paranoia unfold as the marshals investigate deeper into the mystery of the patient's alleged disappearance.
The point, however, is not what the film is about. How it's about is crucial to seeing and understanding the level of mastery Scorsese brings to the material, which can easily be turned to a cheap thriller flick in the hands of another director (at one point during development, the project was supposed to be a directing vehicle for Wolfgang Petersen. No knock on Mr. Petersen, but the man's specialty is in big budget disaster movies. I shudder when I think of how close this movie could have been Outbreak II: Revenge on Shutter Island). Scorsese doesn't settle for the customary peek-a-boos and turn-around-someone's-there crap that guise as "thrills"; instead, he opts for creating an atmosphere that is thoroughly and unflinchingly creepy - Shutter Island is rich with visuals that crawl up and down the spine before settling in uncomfortable recesses of the subconscious.
Some critics might complain that the film lacks the conventional elements of a thriller. We should know by now that Scorsese is not a conventional director, nor can his films be defined by convention and oversimplified classification. Raging Bull is more than a simple boxing movie. Goodfellas is more than just a gangster film. The Age of Innocence is more than a period piece about the Victorian era. Genres don't define the films Scorsese makes and Shutter Island is no exception.
