shutter island

27/30

Dennis Lehane’s novel ‘Shutter Island’ is a story with the skeletal form of a fifties crime-mystery, as the protagonist character Teddy Daniels, U.S Marshal, adopts a detective role in his initial quest to uncover the whereabouts of missing patient Rachel Solando from Ashecliff Mental Hospital. However, the torment suffered by Daniels and the direction his search takes him gives the plot the sharp edge of a psychological thriller. Alongside allusions to cold-war mind experiments the reader is drawn into confusion simultaneous with the protagonist, whose disturbing flash backs to his personal and professional past remain unclear until the end. All this takes place around an island-based mental institute, shrouding the novel with an eerie, gothic mystery resembling an Edgar Allan Poe. In Scorsese’s recent film adaptation, the multi-layered genre has successfully been retained whilst simultaneously portraying the moralistic and sinister side that lies underneath the story’s various dimensions, giving ‘Shutter Island’ it’s unique appeal.
With flashbacks of the Marshal’s violent past and emotionally disturbing scenes of his relationship with his wife and the mental patients, the film is certainly both challenging and disturbing. Yet the most powerful aspect of the film is the mental destruction that has led Teddy Daniels to accept his ultimate fate. Amongst a series of harrowing flash backs, we see the devastating experiences he has endured with his family alongside his close involvement in World War Two, walking through chilling concentration camps and carrying out acts of violence including killing of Nazi soldiers. Through these intermittent memories, stimulated by the unfolding events on the island, we learn that Teddy Daniels is a man who through his career has been hardened by the inhumanities he has witnessed and actively carried out.
At the same time, he has also had a family to which he has had to return and play the ‘loving’ father and husband. The director’s artistic development of these insights to the past show how Daniels’ mental trauma has led him to convolute his two totally opposing past selves as he has become contaminated by guilt, frustration and confusion. Leonardo Di Caprio, chosen for his past success in working with Scorsese and his proven ability to rapidly develop a character, gives a performance that encompasses all the complexities of Teddy Daniels and consequently gives the film its subtle yet potent moral dimension.
Di Caprio brings to the cold light the inconsistency of lifestyle lived by a man who has to execute the acts of brutality of a U.S Marshall while maintaining the humanity required for caring for a family expressing the tormenting effects this can have on a person. Sharply intense, it is a film about a man initially intending to solve a mystery only to discover that he himself has become a graver, irrecoverable mystery stretching the human condition to such an extent that an answer is quite out of the question.
 

11:04:2010