20. Shutter Island

Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese, 2010

A US Marshall (Leonardo DiCaprio) with a tragic past and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) investigate the disappearance of a patient (Emily Mortimer) from an insane asylum built on a remote island, miles out to sea. Things, as you might expect, are not as they seem.

When someone has been making movies for as long as Martin Scorsese has, it can often lead to stagnation, boredom, and irrelevancy. But it can also create a unique mix of confidence and competence that, when married with a more experimental and even playful style, can create an effect powerful enough to steamroll even the most egregious narrative weaknesses into submission. So it is with Shutter Island.

. . . that's an awfully florid way to put it. Let me try it again, more simply: Shutter Island has a bad problem with its climax, but the movie is so well made it kind of doesn't matter.

The problem with Shutter Island is inherited from the novel it's based on - basically, the whole thing is predicated on a very familiar twist at the climax, which is overexplained to the point that it becomes inexcusable. The twist lies at the heart of the story - you can't really go without it, but Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis have managed to mitigate the problem. First, they eliminated the one bit of twistiness that I found the most troublesome (avoiding spoilers, I'll just say it involves the names of two little boys). Second, the scenes that follow it have been slightly tweaked to carry much more emotional weight than they did in the book, so things end on a high point. Third, they avoided treating the twist as a twist (at least to whatever degree was possible), by presenting it bluntly, calmly, and matter-of-factly, and by foreshadowing things to a much greater degree than the book.

The most important thing they did, though, was make sure that the rest of the movie was strong enough to make up for it. The cinematography, sound design, and especially the editing combine to create an atmosphere that's tremendously unsettling without being off-putting, particularly during the extended dream sequences. Yes, they do tend to run on longer than they should, but I would hate to lose even a second of them. The actors deserve special notice as well - many of them manage to create a strong impression with only one or two scenes. Of the main cast, Mark Ruffalo deserves special mention for a deceptively nuanced performance that may seem flat until you know what to look for.

Part of me wants to hate this movie. The bigger part of me loved it.

8.5/10