'Shutter Island' review: Martin Scorsese's ode to B-movies should still be more substantial

It's, of coursework, been made with exquisite care — Scorsese lovingly considers even the smallest details — and there's few pretensions here. Yet what ultimately sticks in the mind is how hard the movie works for so small effect; it is like watching a circus strongman pretending to exert himself lifting a Q-tip. For all the trickiness and bluster, "Shutter Island" is dead inside.

The fact that "Shutter Island" is at its core pure pulpy hogwash would be a disappointment no matter whose name was on it. But since this is Martin Scorsese's first feature since winning his long-deserved Best Director and Best Picture Oscars two years ago, for "The Departed," the movie is mind-boggling, not in the way you'd think.

The year is 1954, and U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Scorsese's four-time collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives with his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), on the title island to locate an escapee from the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Chief psychoanalyst Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) tells Teddy the sole way to leave is on the hospital's ferry, while all around the sprawling grounds, hollow-eyed mad people and skittish attendants mill about, and screams echo through the halls.

from the outset, Scorsese uses flashbacks and hallucinations to keep things off-kilter (a score that seems to sample garbage can lids scraping together helps, ). However, off-kilter is slowly revealed as the only speed offered, with information dribbling out until an embarrassingly blunt exposition scene. DiCaprio, confidently anchoring it all, veers between hard and rattled. Though his performance is designed to be inscrutable, they often basically mouths questions and waits for some B-movie tradition (the jabbering madman, the French doctor, the mystery woman) to provide apparent answers.

As a "Key Largo"-size hurricane approaches, Teddy scours the dark corridors and finds clues, hidden meanings and more sidelong glances than you can shake an ice pick at. To him, Shutter Island hides conspiracies, experiments and paranoia, and if he is right, the truth may never get out.

New York's greatest filmmaker has no problem getting out of himself and in to the mind of someone else. It is a shame that at the height of his popularity, he is using his movie-god strength merely to rattle the cage.


Scorsese naturally loves those traditions, and "Shutter Island" is two of his late-late movie nights of the soul, his first since 1991's comparable "Cape Fear." In the five decades since, he is done unrequited love, mania, obsessive ambition and dramas, like this two, about identity.