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New DVD: Shutter Island

June 14, 2010 in Film | Permalink

DiCaprio and Ruffalo ferry into a nightmare.

Marrying big-budget cinematography to a B-movie aesthetic, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island spectacularly captures the lush surface of a great psychological thriller, but sadly little of the essence. While the gorgeous compositions make for an impressive Hitchcock homage, the drama’s ultimately just a welter of not-so-interesting red herrings from a director who isn’t sure what he wants to accomplish and has saddled himself with a miscast lead actor in Leonardo DiCaprio.

The action revolves around DiCaprio’s U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, who travels in 1954 to a psychiatric hospital on the remote titular isle to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Before long, Daniels believes that the hospital’s omnipotent Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) is trying to hide something–namely horrific medical experimentation on humans that may be inspired by Nazi procedures or connected to the House Un-American Activities Committee. But Daniels has long been under immense stress, as flashbacks to his wartime experiences and his murdered wife attest, and he’s not really sure which end is up. Is he really on to something sinister or is he imagining it all or is it something else?

Scorsese doesn’t seem to care if you figure out the answers halfway through the film; he’s too busy working with the immensely talented cinematographer Robert Richardson on fog and rain machines to fret much about the plotting, which is alternately intentionally and unintentionally confused.

Shhh! Don't tell people that Leonardo DiCaprio lacks gravitas.

DiCaprio, who is better at conveying temper (as in The Departed) than torment, simply lacks the haunted quality to pull off a part of this depth. He’s able to furrow his brow at will, but he has little to call on beneath his skin. This paucity is called into sharp relief during a scene in which he encounters a spectral imprisoned patient, played by Jackie Earle Haley, who may be incarcerated because he knows too much about Dr. Cawley’s unethical work. In a few minutes of screen time, Haley pours out a torrent of pain and persecution that neither Scorsese nor DiCaprio bring to the proceedings. They’re just approximating what they think things should look like, while Haley’s soul is on fire.

Because of his star’s name, Scorsese was able to get the money to make Shutter Island into a lavish work that ranks with Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Kundun in terms of visuals, but a small-budget movie with Haley in the lead would probably have been a far greater thing.

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