CASEY PHILLIPS: To the easily confused, “Shutter Island” will be about as much fun as endlessly twisting a Rubik’s Cube. Director Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel is a truly mind-bending film that almost mandates post-film deliberation to figure out. If you can wrap your head around its twists and turns, however, it’s a brilliantly moody, tense thriller.
The greatest compliment to be paid to Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio (working together here for the fourth time) is that they do a phenomenal job conveying U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels’ experience to viewers.
Daniels (DiCaprio) is constantly running up against shady characters and seemingly impossible situations. He feels surrounded, conspired against and increasingly out of touch with reality. DiCaprio’s sweaty-edged intensity puts the viewer right in his head, and it’s a dark and disturbing place.
HOLLY LEBER: Despite being a far-reaching premise, the film actually evokes a lot of empathy, both in the acting and the way it was shot. As DiCaprio’s character gets more consumed by his surroundings, his feelings – the breathlessness, the nausea, the swirling panic – translates to the audience. The lines between reality, memory, hallucination and dream are constantly twisted and blurred.
Cinematographer Robert Richardson uses an effective dark palette to further convey the story’s tensions. Richardson, a native of Hyannis, Mass., captures the moodiness of the stormy New England coastline, while an edgy score compiled by music supervisor Robbie Robertson raises hackles. This is an example of multiple elements of a film working in tandem to create cinematic harmony.
CASEY: DiCaprio’s is the film’s main edginess purveyor, but the rest of the cast help to build that intensity. Michelle Williams lends a noir, femme fatale element to the film as Daniels’ dead wife, and Ben Kingsley plays the maybe-kindhearted/maybe-monstrous asylum director with a kind of seedy dignity.
HOLLY: “Seedy dignity.” Nice.
While DiCaprio’s Daniels gets more internally and externally frenetic, Mark Ruffalo’s Chuck Aule is a steady, calming force, keeping his partner from going completely off the rails. These are two intensely talented actors who play well off of each other.
In creating this twisted, dark world of “Shutter Island,” credit must go to screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, who adapted the film from Dennis Lehane’s novel. There’s so much attention to detail in the script, you need a flow chart to make sense of it all. We spent a good 45 minutes discussing the myriad plot twists and turns.
CASEY: “Shutter Island” has been compared to a Scorsesian take on Hitchcock, which isn’t far off. It has the same manic, knife-edged suspense that defined Hitchcock’s films. So even if “Shutter Island” isn’t likely to win any travel company endorsements, it’s definitely worth the head trip.
HOLLY: I’m a little dizzy just thinking about it. … In a good way.