SHUTTER ISLAND: Subtlety and Solace in a Small Dose (5% to Be Exact)

Spoiler alert: this post discusses the ending of Shutter Island. If you’re fine with that, please keep reading — and then feel free to comment below.

Like many moviegoers, I was disappointed to learn last August that the release date of Shutter Island, the fourth cinematic collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, would be pushed back from October 2009 to February 2010 — something about the economy, they said. Nearly six months?! Six months I’d have to wait to experience that creep-fest? Six months to be taunted by the film’s trailer every time I entered the Cineplex (and by the looks of my AMC ticket stubs, that’s about20 times)? Bummer. But last Friday, the day finally arrived. I forked over my $10.25 for the 7:00 PM show, arrived 30 minutes early (as usual), climbed into my regular seat (the exact middle of the theatre), and watched Shutter Island. However, what I got wasn’t exactly what I expected. Well, 5% of it was.

The trailer for Shutter Island suggests a psychological horror film/thriller on par with Oscar-worthy movies like Silence of the Lambs (1991) or Se7en (1995) — high-class horror, so to speak. This is good news for me since that is just about the only subgenre of horror I’ll watch; no supernatural (e.g., The Exorcist) or physical horror (e.g., Halloween), please. But I digress. For the most part, Shutter Island lives up to my generic expectations; it is a psychological thriller, a horror film that “locates the dangers and distortions that threaten normal life in the minds of bizarre and deranged individuals” (Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White 310). Like Psycho (1960), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), and most instructively, Silence of the Lambs (above), Shutter Island features characters who remain mostly in the dark, literally and figuratively; and its narrative proceeds in one direction, then veers off in another. In other words, the movie screws with — or attempts to screw with — our heads.

But that’s not all Shutter Island does; it also offers viewers a virtual history lesson on silent and classical film thrillers. For example, Scorsese purportedly screened both Out of the Past (1947) and Vertigo (1958) for his cast, and we see evidence of both films in Shutter Island (e.g., Teddy’s guarded past, Teddy’s fear of heights, sharp high-angle shots atop cliffs). Echoing this sentiment, Rolling Stone mentions that movie lovers can actually think of Shutter Island as a game, seeking out “references that extend through [the aforementioned] film noir, horror (Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim), war trauma (Karl Malden’s Time Limit), phantasmagoria (Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor), Hollywood’s version of asylum life (Anatole Litvak’s Snake Pit) and the terrifying real thing in Frederick Wiseman’s landmark documentary Titicut Follies.” Likewise, Owen Gleiberman claims that Shutter Island is “The Shining with an extra helping of insanity” although I’d argue that there’s more craziness in Jack Nicholson’s character alone than Shutter Island in its entirety. Finally, I’ll add to this ever-growing list The Third Man (the sewer maze; above), Murder, My Sweet (Marlowe’s drug-inducing scenes), and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (insanity via an unreliable narrator, low-key lighting, creepy doctors).

Clearly, Scorsese has fashioned himself a good ol’ postmodern pastiche here. But as Dana Stevens posits, this “method of cinematic pastiche reads better on paper than it does up on screen.” True; we should leave the potpourri-filmmaking to Tarantino. Overall, Shutter Island‘s story, as Gleiberman maintains, “holds you, but it doesn’t grip you.” Like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Aviator (2004), the narrative moves rather slowly, plodding along for nearly 90 minutes before it makes a real effort to “grip you.” For example, at one point during the movie, my husband caught me randomly scanning the theatre. He made a face as if to say What are you looking for? to which I actually whispered, “I’m just waiting for something to happen.” And about 90-100 minutes in, things do happen; the psychological horror begins to surface: the spectator begins to question whether DiCaprio’s Teddy is sane or insane, where Mark Ruffalo’s “Chuck” wondered off to, whether Michelle Williams’s wife/mother is actually a femme fatale, and if Ben Kingsley’s doctor (below) is as creepy as he appears (how disturbing is his delivery of the line “It’s if she evaporated straight through the walls”?!). All of this questioning, this distortion is rather fun. However, because of a recent strand of unreliable-narrator films like Primal Fear (1996), The Usual Suspects (1995), The Sixth Sense (1999, above), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Identity (2003), and Secret Window (2004), it’s also somewhat expected that our detective hero isn’t necessarily all there. Perhaps today’s audience is too jaded, too practiced at discerning such information? And because of this, perhaps Shutter Island really is little more than “an uninspiring cliché,” as Jason Bellamy contends?  In any event, about 95% of Shutter Island fails to offer what I thought it would, i.e., narrative complexity, aesthetic terror, complicated characterization. But what about that remaining 5%? In the last 3-4 shots of Shutter Island I find (some) solace.

Much debate has occurred recently over the ending of Scorsese’s picture, specifically whether Teddy/Andrew is insane at the moment he walks away to be lobotomized. I would say that the majority of people I’ve heard from/tweeted with/read comments from in the past three days believe that the character remains mentally incapacitated, schizophrenic as the film closes. But there are some out there, like me, who deem otherwise.

I’ve mentioned recently on Twitter and on colleagues’ blogs that there’s something about the last 3-4 shots of Shutter Island, or that remaining 5%, that give me pause. There’s an ambiguity there — when Teddy/Andrew and “Chuck” rest on the steps of the asylum smoking cigarettes before the former leaves for his lobotomy — that differs from all of the rather straightforward explanation that immediately prefaces it (i.e., the doctor’s marker board, Teddy’s descriptive flashbacks of his children drowning, etc.). Particularly interesting is Teddy’s/Andrew’s shift in tone when he talks with “Chuck” about escaping from the asylum and when he asks Is it better to live as a monster or die as a good man? Teddy’s/Andrew’s/DiCaprio’s voice is neither frantic nor rote-sounding as it is in scenes directly prior; rather, it is calm, natural, and purposed. Moreover, “Chuck’s” odd reaction shot to the monsters/men question and Teddy’s/Andrew’s willingness to go to the lighthouse imply that “the cycle” of madness hadn’t truly started over. In other words, at this point in the narrative, the character has recovered and understands his prior insanity, his murderous actions (in Germany and at home), and his aloneness; therefore, he fakes his madness so that he may “die a good man.”

Jason Bellamy graciously responds to this argument of mine with, “To get to that moment of kinda-sorta originality, the story first must succumb to the big it’s only a dream’ kind of cliché. And that’s such a whopper that the final note of ambiguity doesn’t feel all that profound.” To an extent, I agree; after all, the character was clearly insane for 2 hours and 10 minutes of the film. But at the same time, I must say that I appreciate the subtlety of those last 3-4 shots in an otherwise relatively uncomplicated narrative. Or perhaps I simply don’t want to believe that Scorsese would offer us such a clear-cut resolution. Your thoughts on Shutter Island’s ending?

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