SHUTTER ISLAND
Having spent most of my life in New England, I have lived nearby several of the institutions left over from the eras when we shuttered away the mentally ill and disabled. I have mixed feelings about these places with their abusive histories well documented in films like Frederick Wiseman’s Titticut Follies. On the other hand deinstitutionalization has not served the homeless mentally ill, for example, whose needs not being met on our city streets either. It is this familiarity, perhaps, that makes Martin Scorcese’s evocates that institutional era so disturbing yet, somehow, I believe that even if you grew up in a Manhattan hi-rise the film will get under your skin, and not in a soothing, comforting way.
Scorsese is one of our greatest directors and not only because of his technical and storytelling skills but also because of his keen interest, almost obsession, with history and how it’s been presented to us. In some ways he’s almost a documentarian, albeit an extremely creative one. The film is an adaptation of a novel by the pop fiction master of darkness, Dennis Lehane (Mystic River.) Lehane sets his stories in and around Boston, taking aim at the institutions uncovering the evils of authorities like the church, the police, authorities that are supposed to be managing humanity, protecting us from our basest tendencies. In this case it’s Ashecliffe, a mental institution for the criminally insane located on an island far out in the middle of Boston Harbor.
The opening shots of the film set the relentlessly gothic noir tone, dark clouds hanging over a ferry cutting through an almost jarringly unreal grey/black ocean. It is also the beginning of the references to our visual memories of the psychological thriller genre, as our heroes are drawn to islands, from which there is never a guarantee of return. This oppressive sense dread intensifies when Federal Marshal, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo di Caprio) arrives at said Shutter Island, teeming with heavily armed guards, and then stripped of his firearm, driven through and locked behind the gates of Ashecliffe. Teddy and his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have been called in to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, an inmate who is incarcerated for having drowned her 3 young children. But Teddy has a boatload of emotional baggage. We see his memories of Dachau at the end of World War II, as well as his wife dead wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams) who urges him to let her go.
Scorcese is a master at place his viewers in the lap of a problemmatic hero, Travis Bickle being one of most extreme examples, and one with some parallels to Teddy. We are taken for a ride, Scorcese knows where we’ll land, yet even if we’ve know the story the visual structure will be too layered too anticipate. Here, after the foreboding grays and blacks of the opening combined with the dull red brick of the institutional wall as well as hideous grey barracks off in the distance, there is a brief respite: a quiet green lawn, the calm before the storm. As Teddy becomes more and more lost in this place, w move from the quiet of Dr. Cawley’s (Ben Kingsley) baronial fireplace, waves crashed cliffs, to the dungeon-like cells of films like Dracula.
Ultimately for me, the two films is the German Expressionist masterpiece,The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with it’s black and gray mental institution spiral. But it also left me bereft in the same way that Hitchcock does in Vertigo where he managed to evoke a similar kind of shadiness and terror by juxtaposing the mental confusion of the main character with the visual beauty and clarity of San Francisco. In all three films, we are left with a sense of profound unbalance and misperception, that leaves us questioning our own ability to understand what we’re seeing.
To return to where I began, it was the haunted locations used for Ashecliffe that provided the icing on the very disturbing cake. Those places had, at one time, been inhabited by the fragile, the violent, people who were often given lobotomies, shock treatments, ice baths as well as, later, thorazine and talk therapy. Scorcese opens the doors and then pushes us to the very edge of the cliffs that surround it, except that, we get to walk away after the two hours are up and, hopefully, leave it behind.
Shutter Island opens February 19, 2010.
Directed by Martin Scorcese; written by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane; produced by Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Bradley J. Fischer and Martin Scorcese; Director of Photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. Released by Paramount Pictures.
With: Leonardo DiCaprio (Teddy Daniels); Mark Ruffalo (Chuck Aule); Ben Kingsley (Dr. Cawley); Michelle Williams (Dolores); Emily Mortimer(Rachel Solando I); Patricia Clarkson (Rachel Solando II); Jackie Earle Haley (George Noyce) and Max von Sydow (Dr. Naehring).
