Review of Shutter Island

Kirk Honeycutt for The Hollywood Reporter, February 13, 2010

BERLIN -- Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island" is a remarkable high-wire act, performed without a net and exploiting all the accumulated skills of a consummate artist. It dazzles and provokes. But since when did Scorsese become a circus performer?

The movie certainly keeps you in its grip from the opening scene: It's a nerve-twisting, tension-jammed exercise in pure paranoia and possibly Scorsese's most commercial film yet. With a top cast hitting their marks with smooth efficiency, "Island" looks like a boxoffice winner. Paramount opens the film domestically Friday Feb. 19.

Laeta Kalogridis' screenplay is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, whose blue-collar crime novels have been turned into such movies as "Gone Baby Gone" and "Mystic River." But this story clearly derives from memories and images of old movies -- from 1950s Gothic mysteries and Cold War-era paranoia thrillers to 1960s movies cranked out by the Roger Corman factory (where Scorsese once toiled), especially its Edgar Allan Poe/Vincent Price chillers.

You get an isolated island, howling weather, mad scientists, an ex-Nazi, tough cops, deranged patients and a penal hospital with crowded, filthy cells and corridors stretching forever -- possibly beyond sanity.

Scorsese has given himself a film student's puzzle: Try to make a '50s-era thrill ride with today's techniques and technology. One senses his childlike delight behind every camera move and jump cut. As his audience squirms, he's in movie heaven.

From the opening music chords, supervised by Robbie Robertson from existing source material, a sense of doom settles over the film's characters. In 1954, two U.S. marshals -- Teddy (Scorsese's go-to star, Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) -- watch the forbidding fortress that is Shutter Island loom larger and larger as their ferry approaches the island's only dock.

In quick order, exposition rolls off the actors' tongues, like in those B-movies that lasted only 70 minutes. Shutter Island is a hospital for the criminally insane. One female psychopathic patient has gone missing, incredibly, from a locked room within the fearsome-looking Ashecliffe Hospital. A hurricane is approaching. The guards and psychiatrists then greet the lawmen with hostility and evasions. Everything screams, "Go back!"

Review of Shutter Island

Todd McCarthy for Variety - Saturday February 13th, 2010

As Kubrick did with Stephen King's novel, Scorsese uncustomarily ventures here into bestseller territory that obliges him to deliver certain expected ingredients for the mass audience and adhere to formula more than has been his nature over the years. Although "The Departed" and "Cape Fear" come close, "Shutter Island" is the film that most forces the director to walk the straight and narrow in terms of carefully and clearly telling a story; if testing himself within that discipline was his intention, this most devoted of cinema students among major American directors gets an "A."