Hard to find comfort zone in ‘Shutter Island’

Published 3:21 pm Thursday, February 18, 2010

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” is a movie designed to keep you as uncomfortable and as on edge as possible. It wants to drive you insane, in fact.

And why not? That’s what the film is doing to its protagonist, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), first seen vomiting aboard a ferry in rough seas.

Daniels is a federal marshal, bound for the asylum for the criminally insane on Shutter Island. This is an isolated rock that is part Alcatraz, part Skull Island from “King Kong” — at least that how Scorsese’s gothic approach treats it.

A prisoner — er, patient — has escaped from the institution, and Daniels and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) are investigating. That appears to be the plot, anyway. But the deeper we go, the greater the sense that something else might be behind Daniels’ mission.

For one thing, he’s tortured by his memories of liberating a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II (the year is 1954). Equally haunting is the death of his wife (Michelle Williams), especially as he keeps seeing her in his mind.

Scorsese, no stranger to high visual style in film, has taken the asylum setting and used it as a license to go over the top. Everything’s big here: the craning camera, the ponderous compositions, the typically tortured performance by DiCaprio.

In fact, the acting challenge appears to be the main reason for the movie to exist. DiCaprio is joined by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, as two sinister psychiatrists, and there are small, intense scenes for Patricia Clarkson, Ted Levine and Jackie Earle Haley.

Scorsese and his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, jerk each conversation along by compressing time — the movie makes you anxious even when two people are simply sitting in a room talking.

At times, it’s too much. When the marshals dodge falling trees in a deluge or clamber about rocky cliffs over the sea, Scorsese lets the more lurid aspects of Dennis Lehane’s novel run wild.

There’s a lot of heavy breathing throughout. The nerve-jangling is effective, and the movie buff in me enjoyed guessing whether Scorsese (America’s Movie Buff Numero Uno, after all) was busy aping “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” or “Shock Corridor” — to name a pair of classic stories set inside institutions.

But the Scorsese movie “Shutter Island” most recalls is his bombastic remake of “Cape Fear.” This film is better than that — its gaudy style is eventually explained — but it won’t be remembered as a stellar effort by one of America’s most talented filmmakers.