Shutter Island: movie review

Ever wonder what a trip through the Haunted Mansion might be like if the place weren’t so Disneyfied? That’s what Shutter Island threatens to be, as Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo are federal marshals headed into an insane asylum on a lonely island in a storm, and you prepare yourself for what you fear will be a few hours of monsters jumping out of every corner as the movie teases just that notion in its early scenes. It also threatens to be an unrepentant period piece, as the movie is set in the fifties and the two main characters act exactly like g-men out of the fifties acted (or at least the characters act in a manner consistent with how g-men out of the fifties are stereotypically portrayed in all modern movies). But Shutter Island ends up being none of the above, as it’s not a horror movie, it’s not a period piece, and it’s not a detective yarn either. In fact part of the fun is that you’ll spend the entire movie trying to figure out just what movie you’re watching.

Suffice it to say that by the end of the two-plus hours you’re watching a different movie than the one you thought you were being set up for, as the movie slowly morphs in front of your eyes and you find yourself trying to figure out what’s really going on just as frantically as DiCaprio’s character is doing the same. As the plot unfolds, you learn that his real reason for going to the island isn’t what he claims it is, and ultimately may not even be what he thinks it is. All along you know there’s a surprise ending coming of one kind of another, and you resolve to not decide whether you like the movie or not until you find out what that surprise is.

Some of you will love the ending while others will hate it, and some who dislike the ending will do so for entirely different reasons than others, but I found that it worked for me. My sole issue with the movie was not the ending but the middle stretch. Every good surprise ending should be revealed via numerous clues in broad daylight all throughout the course of the movie, yet manage to keep the audience’s head spinning sufficiently that by the time the big surprise arrives most of them haven’t quite yet figured it out and they’re kick themselves because they suddenly realize that all the signs were right there in front of them the entire time and them were simply too enraptured by the experience to put the clues together quickly enough.

The problem here is that after about forty-five minutes of presenting the audience with delightfully confusing clues at a fairly decent clip, the movie slows down so thoroughly in its midsection that not only is the middle stretch not entertaining in its own right, it’s so unenthralling that it allows your mind to begin to wander just far enough that you figure out what’s really happening before you ultimately wanted to; if you haven’t outright guessed the surprise a half hour before you get to it, then it’ll at least have been one of the possibilities you kicked around while you were killing mental time during the midsection. The third act bounced back with something of a vengeance, but if the movie had been a half hour shorter, I suspect the ending would have been more effective all around. That having been said, unlike the last time DiCaprio and Martin Scorcese worked together on The Departed, a movie which Scorcese clearly had no idea how to end it and so we instead got to spend the final twenty minutes of the film watching each character’s head exploding one by one in lieu of an actual ending, Shutter Island does in fact have a real ending.

In all, I’m glad I watched it, and I’m tempted to go back and watch the first forty-five minutes again just so I can have a better understanding of what I was really watching – and this is coming from a guy who rarely wants to watch any film more than once. This is one of those movies in which giving you any less vague of a review of than this one would be arming you with too much advance information going in. Suffice it to say that the movie rises above its threat to become a horror movie (at its worst it’s no more physically disgusting than a typical episode of CSI) as well as its threat to become a period piece (the plot could almost have been adapted to present day, and come to think of it, I wish it had been, although it’s not much of a detraction). And the ending, while requiring a leap of faith and a willingness to accept a lack of literal storytelling, isn’t a twist at random. It’s not as if it turns out that DiCaprio and company have actually been at Disney World the whole time. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve said too much.