Scorsese's 'Island' of Insanity

by Brett Parker

Martin Scorsese is a master filmmaker who shows, among other brilliant things, the delusions people construct for their lives to combat realities of the harsh real world. Think of the undercover moles’ deceptions in The Departed, Travis Bickle’s bloody need for redemption in Taxi Driver, Rupert Pupkin’s fever dreams of stardom in The King of Comedy, or Henry Hill’s outlaw lifestyle in Goodfellas. The ideals of a Scorsese protagonist can take on a wild reality of their own, in constant threat from the morals and formalities of normal society.

Shutter Island could very well be Scorsese’s most deranged and unsettling exploration of this theme, and that’s saying something for the guy who made Taxi Driver. For all the things he has presented throughout his legendary career, this is his first plunge into classical macabre (although his Cape Fear remake held tinges of it). The result is a deliciously startling display of his most burning obsessions. Even when the film’s third act takes a shocking turn towards an old-school horror story gimmick, his masterful evocation of his themes blasts away any doubts towards the material.

The time is 1954 and two U.S. Marshalls are assigned to investigate the disappearance of a mental patient on a hospital off the coast of Massachusetts called Shutter Island. Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a seasoned detective with a troubled past while Carl (Mark Ruffalo) is his straight-faced rookie partner. After a fog-ridden ferry ride, the duo arrives at the elaborate mental compound and overwhelming feelings of unease quickly strikes them. The head doctor, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) gives off an unsettling vibe of uneasy as he explains that a female patient escaping such a secure island appears highly fishy. Of course the twitching and unnerving mental patients add no comfort to the situation (one warns Teddy to RUN!)

Stirring up matters further is the fact that Teddy has his own hidden motives for being on the island. He reveals to Carl that the hospital may be harboring the violent lunatic who burned down his apartment complex, killing his beloved wife Dolores (Michelle Williams). Teddy pulled strings to be assigned this case in the hope of confronting his wife’s killer. But soon Teddy is suffering hallucinations within this island of insanity, haunted by visions of his wife and horrific memories from his tour in World War II (he helped to liberate a Nazi death camp). Teddy develops a hard time separating fantasy from reality and he begins to feel no different than the other mental patients. What exactly happened in his past? What suppressed memories are fueling his madness? Just what exactly is going on amidst this asylum?

Shutter Island is Scorsese’s whirl through pulp noir and classical horror stories. Adapted from the Dennis Lehane novel, this is a world of fedoras, asylum weirdoes, and living nightmares. Scorsese uses this landscape to explore the clashing between his usual themes of guilt and hostility, all basked in a Hitchcockian Technicolor. As his vessel of intensity, Scorsese once again looks to DiCaprio, his new age muse. He physically embodies Scorsese’s suppression of sins, as he furiously and frantically tries to deal with broken memories from his scarred past. This is the familiar Scorsese protagonist turned up to new levels of insanity. Also turned up intensely in the director’s eye for hostile environments. Not only do we trudge through murder, war, and psychopaths, but we see the shockingly unorthodox ways in which doctors try to fend off borderline-torturous forms of psychotherapy.

Scorsese plays with ideals of delusions not just with the asylum world but with the era of the story itself. If Shutter Island is trying to put up a healthy front while disturbance festers among the facility underneath it all, then perhaps post-WWII America suffered the same problem. The film employs nightmarish surrealism to show how certain characters are dogged by post-war disillusionment and post-traumatic stress disorder. One character, specifically, goes to horrifying lengths to bury the tragic realities of his world.

This film has an explosion of a twist ending; a mind-bender that forces you to reexamine everything that has gone before. This ending brings suspension of disbelief to the red zone and flirts with the preposterous. Some might find it too much of an asylum-story cliché. With any other filmmaker, this plotting might feel cheap, but Scorsese pumps it with such cinematic force and personal resonance that it feels more masterful than it probably deserves to be. I’ve seen the film twice now and I’ve noticed the impressive ways Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (Alexander) conceal the secrets with great suspense, all while small evidence of them stare us straight in the face. The twist adds such a heated intensity under Scorsese’s themes that any holes that could very well be present in the plot go strongly overlooked.

You can see the ways Shutter Island could’ve simply been a haunted horror story; a pulp gimmick of cheap thrills. Yet watching Scorsese employ his sublime expertise into such material is exciting beyond belief. The film is a startling historical account like Gangs of New York while also displaying societal criticism like Taxi Driver. Any director can evoke things that go bump in the night, but when a filmmaker like Scorsese roots those bumps in the scariest recesses of the human mind, the result is guaranteed to shake you.