Shutter Island

Woah nelly. Watch out when you read this reveiw. Spoilers abound. This is one of the more fascinating films (Yeah, I'm saying now. Right off the bat. I'm going to snob out on you guys.) that I've seen in a long time. This may be one of Scorsese's best films to date. Everything about it was very, very interesting. Leonardo DiCaprio delivers one of his best performances too. Which is saying a lot considering The Departed, Gangs of New York, Catch Me if You Can, Blood Diamond, The Aviator, and Titanic. And that's only like half of his resume. He's an impressive actor. One of my favorites. And this may be his best. Ever.

DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshall investigating the disappearance of a female patient at the mental hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island in Massachusetts. As the film progresses, the viewer gains an increasing insight into who Teddy Daniels really is. He says that the reason he wanted this assignment was a result of his wife's death in a fire in their apartment. He says that a man named Andrew Laeddis set the fire, and was now a patient on Shutter Island. He wanted to find Laeddis, and somehow gain closure in his wife's murder. But it becomes clear, relatively quickly, that his story is flawed, or at least in question. He begins having these bizarre dreams of his wife, and a little girl. He flashes back to his days as a soldier in World War II, where he was a part of a company that liberated the concentration camp at Dachau, where he sees the little girl as a dead body in the camp. The dream sequences are some of the best representations of dreams I've ever seen in cinema. Scorsese does a great job making them look like actual dreams. Everyone knows that dreams rarely make sense. You do things you wouldn't do normally. You say things that don't make sense. You react to things in irrational ways, even though they seem to make sense at the time. Scorsese is able to capture the lunacy of the average person's dream in viewing the dreams that DiCaprio has.

Mark Ruffalo plays Chuck Aule, DiCaprio's new partner, a recent transfer to Boston from the Marshall bureau in Seattle. This is absolutely Ruffalo's best performance, and comes at a time in his career when he seems to be shifting from the romantic comedy type role of 13 Going on 30 to a new type of role. That of the serious actor who takes small parts in artsy blockbusters like Where the Wild Things Are and large roles in independent feeling movies like The Brothers Bloom (Which was great by they way, I highly recommend it). I was on to Ruffalo though. At one point when he and DiCaprio were questioning other inmate/patients in the hospital about the disappearance of Rachel Solando, who was committed after drowning her 3 children and the dressing them up in her home and pretending that they weren't dead, one inmate asks Ruffalo to step away and get her a glass of water. After he leaves, she violently scribbles something down in DiCaprio's notebook. I immediately turned to my buddy and whispered in the theater, "He's Dr. Sheehan." Dr. Sheehan was Rachel Solando's primary psychiatrist while on the island. He had, reportedly, left the same morning they arrived for vacation, a claim DiCaprio never believes.

Sir Ben Kinglsey, famous for his portrayal of Gandhi in a film of the same name, is magnificent as the Dr. John Cawley, the chief psychiatrist on the island. The entire movie he is mysterious. Giving half answers to all of DiCaprio's questions and remaining detached from everything that's happening on the island. He is nearly emotionless the entire film, not an easy thing to do. It becomes very clear, very early, that Kingsley knows much more than he is letting on.

It was pretty easy to see in the trailers that DiCaprio is a patient on the island. I knew this, not form the film being spoiled for me, it just seemed pretty obvious from the trailers. What you don't know, however, is if he is actually crazy or not. You don't want him to be crazy. It's Leonardo DiHottie-o after all. And you don't think he is. You think he's being set up. You think that he's been asking to many questions on the mainland, and that he's asking way to many questions on Shutter Island. But in the final minutes of the film, we learn otherwise. He killed his wife, because his wife killed their three children. Rachel Solando is a figment of his imagination. And so is Teddy Daniels. DiCaprio's real name is Andrew Laeddis, the name of the man who he says killed his wife by burning their apartment. He's created defense mechanisms in order to distance himself from the reality of his own life. Everything we saw was a part of an experiment by Kingsley, the only person who thought DiCaprio was still able to be saved. Ruffalo is in fact Dr. Sheehan (Boom, roasted.) and was posing as his partner so he could keep an eye on him while he was having his way around the island "investigating". The role playing exercise was to be the last attempt to help DiCaprio before he was given up on and lobotomized as part of government experiments.

I didn't see that coming at all. I was really taken aback. But it finally all made sense. This film is an incredibly interesting look into the human mind. And we think we see DiCaprio come out of it. He wakes, finally, from another one of his hallucinatory dreams appearing to know exactly who he really is, and what has really happened in his life. He tells Kingsley and Ruffalo all about his true name and life story. This is a good thing. This means that he's cured. Then, as he's sitting on the steps of one of the buildings on the island, smoking a cigarette with Ruffalo, he wispers to him, "What's our next move Chuck? What are we going to do next?" Ruffalo nods sadly at Kingsley across the courtyard and a few orderlies begin to walk up to him. Then, DiCaprio says something really interesting to Ruffalo. He says something like, "Is it better to live as a bad man, or die as a good man?" He the gets up, joins the orderlies, and walks away. Presumably to be lobotomized, effectively ending his life. It's so fascinating. But I'm not sure what to make of that last bit. The movie ends immediately after the aforementioned scene, leaving the viewer to wonder about DiCaprio's fate, and the meaning of his last statement. Think as you will.