Shutter Island

Head case: Scorsese’s ‘Shutter Island’ is at its eerie best when it’s not trying too hard to explain things

February 19, 2010|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

With “Shutter Island,’’ Martin Scorsese proves susceptible to the chic of filming a Dennis Lehane bestseller. Clint Eastwood turned “Mystic River’’ into lugubrious opera; Ben Affleck pumped “Gone Baby Gone’’ full of pulp. Surprisingly, Scorsese divines Hitchcock in the competing genres of Lehane’s book, which trotted out psychological suspense, grisly melodrama, wartime horror, and some risibly punning names while spinning a yarn about two federal marshals on the hunt for an escaped mental patient.

It’s an inspired extraction though not a terribly satisfying one. This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese’s aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive. The movie’s big moments hinge on long explanations, meant to clear everything up. But all the telling seems to neutralize Scorsese’s kinetic power.

When Boston Detective Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives at the movie’s title destination and begins poking around the island’s mental hospital, the script by the writer and producer Laeta Kalogridis always feels like it’s playing catch up, retreating into flashbacks and dream sequences, featuring Teddy’s dead wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), to keep the story moving forward.

Ostensibly, Teddy and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), want to know how a murderous inmate vanished and where she is. The hospital’s creepy top doctors, played by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow with a wicked, white crew cut, aren’t much help. But the missing patient becomes beside the point. As was the case with Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo,’’ Anthony Perkins in “Psycho,’’ and Tippi Hedren in “Marnie,’’ the more crucial matter is Teddy’s increasingly unsteady state of mind. Apparently, the man who set the fire that killed Dolores is also an inmate, and Teddy is hell-bent on finding him, too.

Scorsese is at home with psychologically combustible men - Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,’’ Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull,’’ and Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy.’’ In “Shutter Island,’’ Scorsese enjoys tracing his fingers along Teddy’s psychic fissures. The movie creeps into his brain and reveals a perverse vibrancy. His dream Dolores leaks water and dissolves into ash. She’s a ghostly figment, and her blurry place in Teddy’s head intensifies.