Criminally Good

Shutter Island begins with a woozy, sea-sick U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and neither he nor the audience will gain their equilibrium for the next two hours and twenty minutes. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, is a wonderfully actualized piece of filmmaking. Scorsese has concocted a savory stew out of Lehane’s story of paranoid isolation and ever ratcheting psychological trauma. Stripped of their guns – and their power - at the ironclad gates of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are set adrift on a remote and barren penal colony where everybody is a suspect and no one is a reliable narrator. Saturated with color, and full of elements as primal as a hurricane, Shutter Island plays like the kind of movie Alfred Hitchcock would have made - if Hitchcock had had Scorsese’s prodigious talent.

Shutter Island may be the best movie Scorsese has ever made. It is Casino good. Masterly directed and sure-footed, Shutter Island shows all the colors of Scorsese’s palette without any of the showy pretentiousness that sometimes upstaged his earlier work. Everything he has learned about camera placement and movement is utilized here but all is in employed to illuminate and advance the story. Some of the framing is absolutely gorgeous. Shutter Island is Scorsese’s valedictory turn.

~rave!