Since 1976, when he directed Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese has stood to become one of the most influential and the greatest filmmakers in the industry. Most of his body of work deals with guilt, angst and sudden rage. From Mean Street, Raging Bull, Last temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, and Cape Fear, all sums up pictures painted beautifully depicting human character who often refuse to forgive themselves. Marty won his first long overdue oscar in 2007 with The Departed which is not his best work per se but the truly deserved the statue after being snubbed by the academy 5 times before. This time he is back with what is known as his fourth collaboration with Leo Dicaprio since Gangs of New York, each is getting better than the previous one. But Shutter Island is an exception. It is a misopportunity.
Shutter island sets back in 1954 Boston, where two U.S Marshals Teddy Daniels (Leo Dicaprio), and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) were sent into Ashecliffe a mental hospital for the criminally insane in Shutter island to investigate the missing of a mentally ill female patient Rachel Solando (Emily mortimer) . They met Dr. Cowley (Sir Ben Kingsley) who is the director of the institution to give them the briefing of the institution. Teddy feels there is a dark secret that is kept by the staff and the doctors that might be related to wrongdoing and illegal practice of human experiment in the island. He then starts to hallucinate his past especially his dead wife and child. All of these mysterious events lead up to a big secret twist ending which is really not particularly engaging.
With such weak a plot, Shutter Island becomes the worst Scorsese’s body of work over the past 20 years. It is not a movie that Scorsese was born to make. It is a bit promising in the beginning, but after several hallucination scenes it became more and more obvious and it plays off like any other psychological thriller with too much unnecessary verbose scenes. And Dicaprio, boy did he need a new material. We have seen his nervous breakdown performance since The Aviator and it’s getting better in Blood Diamond. But it then continued to become stale and the actor cannot tell when enough is enough, ok we get it. He needs to find some new material because an actor is judged by his versatility to take on multidimensional characters. Scorsese operated on a full hitchcockian mode in directing this movie. It was by far his most commercially successful and mainstreamed endeavor ever, but it is too bad for a legend like him to make this simple and lack of depth material become part of his amazing resumes of his glorious filmmaking experience over the past four decades. If it were not directed by Scorsese, I would say the picture is just fine, but in the hand of a master filmmaker, this movie is just disposable although some part of it is still worth your time and my mild recommendation.
"Shutter Island" a Paramount Picture releases, is rated R for disturbing violent content, language, and some nudity. Two and a half Stars out of Four (C+). -Mulyadi Tjoa, MIS officer @ P.T. Freeport Indonesia-