“Pull yuhself togethuh, Teddy,” Leonardo DiCaprio mutters through a thick, overplayed Bostonian accent. He stares bleary-eyed at himself in the mirror, splashes water on his grizzled, unshaven face and walks out to the ferryboat dock, clenching a limp cigarette between his teeth. His hands shake without a glass of liquor to keep him steady.
He dons a tilted fedora and leans over the deck railing in his gray trench coat, overlooking the turbulent, leaden waters of Boston Harbor with glassy eyes.
In the ghostly mist that swathes the deck, a shadowy coastline appears in the gloom: Shutter Island.
The drama is set in 1954 in the mist of Boston Harbor Islands. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the lead role and he is an older, darker looking Leo, far from the charismatic youth audiences swooned over aboard the Titanic in 1997. “Shutter Island” is the film adaptation of the 2003 bestselling suspense novel written by Dennis Lehane, author of “Mystic River.”
In Martin Scorsese’s film, “Shutter Island,” Leonardo DiCaprio plays the role of U.S. Marshall Edward “Teddy” Daniels, a world-weary alcoholic officer who’s arrived on the ferry to Shutter Island with his new eager-to-please partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo). The pair has been assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando, at Ashecliffe Hospital, an infamous insane asylum that houses 66 criminally insane patients.
When Marshall Daniels and Aule are greeted at the hospital gates by Deputy Warden McPherson (John Carroll Lynch), they are stripped of all their guns and briefed on the hospital’s strict policies.
“You act as if insanity is catching… ” Daniels says.
Deputy Warden McPherson only smirks darkly.
The hospital is perched atop the rocks of Boston Harbor’s Shutter Island, set apart isolated from the outside world. Teddy Daniels’ has his own misgivings about the criminally insane as his wife was supposedly killed by a pyromaniac. A sinister miasma of suspicion lingers over the hospital staff and patients at Ashecliffe and as Daniels’ investigation delves deeper, he is denied access to records he suspects would break the case. He begins to question whether he hasn’t been entrapped in the snares of a twisted plot by doctors whose radical experimentations borderline immoral. As the inexplicable clues multiply, Daniels begins to doubt the doctors, his partner, even his own sanity.
He spends the rest of the 138 minutes of the film dodging orderlies, interrogating patients, slinking down creepy, unlit corridors, and running amok on the rocky crags of the shore, anything to separate himself from the insanity on Shutter Island.
The film is intelligent and suspenseful, the plot intriguing and multi-layered, and the characters intense and believable. The film is supplemented with an eerie, dramatic cinematic soundtrack and haunting, surreal imagery of Daniels’ flashbacks, Nazi death camps, his dead wife, and a nameless little girl that haunts his dreams, draped limp and lifeless in his arms.
The ending twist is not entirely unsurprising, but the smaller details that come together paint an elaborate picture of a fractured, tormented mind.
Follow the clues, unravel the riddles, and expose the conspiracies. But try not to go insane from tension and suspense in your stay on Shutter Island.
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