FILM DETAILS
RELEASE DATE: February 19, 2010
WRITTEN BY: Laeta Kalogridis
STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer
RUNNING TIME: 139 minutes
For most directors, Shutter Island would be one of the better movies of their career, a well-crafted, gripping thriller with a shocking twist. For Martin Scorsese, it’s a lesser film, only worth a cursory chapter in an otherwise lengthy summation of his career. I’m not doing that, mind you. Shutter Island is as worthy of dissection as any other Scorsese picture, one rich with layered characters and themes that run well beneath the movie’s surface trappings. It’s such a different kind of picture for him, however, that it’s easy to overlook how it fits into the grand sweep of his work.
Based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), Shutter Island sinks viewers into the journey of supposed US marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) or, more accurately, Andrew Laeddis, a man who killed his mentally disturbed wife after she drowned their three children and who as a result also suffered a debilitating mental breakdown. Now he imagines himself as Teddy, paired up with Marshal Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) to first find a missing patient at the Shutter Island facility for the criminally insane, then to root out a conspiracy involving government mind-control experiments. All of this is in his head, however, revealed to both Teddy and the audience in a twist ending worthy of M. Night Shyamalan. His partner is actually Dr. Sheehan, colleague of Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley). The pair were making one last effort to free Teddy of his delusions; otherwise he would undergo a lobotomy. Their efforts briefly work, but in the end, Teddy lapses back into delusion—or does he? As with most of Shutter Island, the answer is not always clear upon first viewing.
(Note that, due to the nature of this film, most characters have two names. For the purposes of this chapter, I generally refer to them by the name Laeddis [a.k.a., Edward “Teddy” Daniels] perceives them to have because those are the names the characters are referred to throughout most of the movie. This includes his own name.)
A man is his experiences. There is no running from them. There is no shutting them away. We can only face them or go mad trying to hide from them. But often, the guilt of trying to hide from them can be so overpowering it can break us. In many ways, Shutter Island is a bog standard “twist” thriller, the sort of pure genre picture Martin Scorsese tends to avoid unless business arrangements or an impending career crisis forces his hand toward the mainstream (e.g., The Color of Money and Cape Fear). What boils beneath the surface is the real draw, however, because it not only lets Scorsese tinker with a modern take on classic noir and gothic thriller, but it also allows him to delve into character exploration in a way he’d never done before.
Shutter Island is a rare Scorsese film where the idea of spoilers actually matters. Similar to such pictures as The Sixth Sense, an integral part of the experience is not knowing what is coming and then, on second viewing, seeing the picture with new eyes. Many (if not most) Scorsese works are more concerned with the journey than any particular destination. We’re not on the edge of our seats wondering if LaMotta will win his next fight or if Hughes will get his “Spruce Goose” to fly. It’s the character study that is important in these works, the life experiences they explore, the worlds and people they help us understand.
Here, because the picture is told from Teddy’s perspective, a character study is inherently flawed, coming as it does through an unreliable narrator. At the very least it requires repeated viewings to get to the core of what drives him—and what drives him is the classic Scorsese anguish: guilt. Driven by mental illness, Teddy’s wife set fire to their apartment. Rather than seek help for her, they moved to a lakeside cottage to seek peace. There, she drowned their three children. In his grief, he shot and killed her. These compounded layers of tragedy drive him so mad that he becomes disconnected from reality. At the start of the picture, however, we know none of this. Like Teddy, we believe he is a federal investigator searching for a missing woman who (of course) drowned her children.
The very first lines of the picture ring differently once you know the truth: “Pull yourself together, Teddy. It’s just water. It’s a lot of water.” Initially, this just appears to be seasickness, not an uncommon trait to give a character. When he arrives at the docks of Shutter Island, the guards are strapping weapons and looking ready for trouble, despite no evident danger—because the real danger is Teddy himself, though he doesn’t know it yet. When he mentions to Deputy Warden McPherson (John Carroll Lynch) that his boys seem on edge, the Deputy Warden says, “Right now, we all are.” It’s the truth, too, but not for the reasons Teddy thinks. He is the one they fear. He’s the reason they are ready for trouble.
This entire song and dance is an elaborate ruse, an experiment to snap Teddy out of his psychosis and return him to reality. How much we see on-screen is real and how much is imaginary is never quite clear. In some instances, we’re seeing Teddy interact with real people playing roles for the benefit of the experiment. In others, the people we see do not exist. He and his “partner,” Chuck Aule (who is actually Teddy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Sheehan) are taken to see Dr. John Cawley, the head psychiatrist at the facility. A dangerous patient has escaped, he tells them, and the pair are tasked with tracking her down. The patient, Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), allegedly drowned her own children. It’s as if Dr. Cawley is planting seeds in Teddy’s head, hoping to get him to recognize himself in the story. Somehow, this woman disappeared from her cell. The doctor says it’s like Rachel “evaporated,” an appropriate descriptor, given the nature of Teddy’s wife’s crimes. He also explains to Teddy that Rachel has created a fictional reality around herself, believing the doctors and nurses and staff around her are actually cops and delivery people and others. Teddy asks, “How is it possible the truth never gets through to her?” He doesn’t realize he’s asking about himself.
The answer to his question, of course, is that feeling guilt over tragic failures can be the unseen hand guiding a person’s thoughts and actions. Despite the theme being so prevalent in the director’s work, rarely is it as direct as this. Scorsese characters are wracked with guilt but often don’t know why. They sense that they are sinful in some way but either cannot face it directly (Charlie in Mean Streets), shift blame onto others (Jake in Raging Bull), or feel guilt for things they did not do (Paul in After Hours). Frank Pierce’s guilt in Bringing Out the Dead is the closest to that experienced by Teddy, rooted in a failure on his part to save someone who could have been saved. Teddy’s is further compounded not only by the fact that it was his children he lost—three of them, all young—and that he could have prevented it had he gotten the help his wife needed but also by the fact that he took his wife’s life as a result. It was more a mercy killing than one stemming from hurt and anger, but to perceive so much blood on your hands? “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!”1
Everything he sees and experiences over the course of the picture is a manifestation of this crushing burden. When a storm hits while Teddy and Chuck are exploring a graveyard, the storm is Teddy’s subconscious screaming at him, imploring him to either snap back to reality or run further from it. He’s inundated with images of water, images of the sea, of crashing waves and the quiet violence of nature. These are contrasted with visions of fire and ash, of clouds of cigarette smoke that seem to have lives of their own, of matches that act as daggers in the dark. Even in his fantasy world, he cannot escape the tragedy that transformed him. Hints of it appear repeatedly, symbolism woven into the seemingly ordinary. Even the skies pour down the very thing used to kill his children. Curious, then, that Dr. Cawley and Dr. Sheehan (as Chuck) seem to encourage him to plunge further into his fantasy. That’s the one thing Teddy is right about: They are conducting experiments on the mind—on his mind. “Crazy people are the perfect subjects,” he says. “They talk; no one listens.” But here, people are listening intently.
While in a mausoleum, Chuck seems to urge on Teddy’s delusions. “Everything about this place stinks,” he says, offering a laundry list of suspicious activities that seem to point to the island being some grand government experiment. He all but urges him to question everything he sees. This would seem to push him further into madness rather than draw him out of it. He does it again later, after the storm (if there ever actually was a storm), when he urges Teddy to go to ward C. He pushes Teddy further into the fictional world he’s created for himself, presumably in the hope of making him see that it’s fictional. That appears to be his entire MO. When he offers Teddy a copy of the intake form for Andrew Laeddis, the imagined arsonist who set the nonexistent fire that Teddy believes killed his wife, the papers are actually Teddy’s. Chuck is attempting to trigger a break from the fantasy.
This happens again when Teddy confronts Rachel Solando, who has supposedly reappeared after being missing for a day. She’s actually a nurse playing a role, but Teddy doesn’t realize that. Instead, he believes she is a deranged patient who has mistaken him for her dead husband. “My Jim is dead, so who the fuck are you?” she demands. It’s a layered question. To Teddy, it appears to be part of the trauma Rachel is experiencing. Once you know Rachel is just playing a role, it seems to just be part of her act. In reality, it’s both of these things, but most important of all, it’s an honest question. It’s an attempt to force Teddy to think about who he really is. It’s a push toward the truth. Who is he?
As Teddy searches ward C for the truth behind Shutter Island, he encounters a patient in solitary, George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley). This prompts a discussion about truth and deception. “This isn’t about the truth,” Noyce tells him. “It’s about you.” Noyce questions him about Chuck, suggesting his partner is not all that he seems. “I trust this man,” Teddy insists. But Noyce knows what’s really happening and says, “Then they’ve already won.”
Teddy already mistrusts the caretakers of the island, deeply so, but for the wrong reasons. The audience can’t trust them, either, in no small part because the reality we’re offered is often twisted and difficult to believe. Teddy’s curious ride with the warden late in the picture, for example: The warden seems to try to open Teddy’s mind to violence, suggesting it’s a basic part of human nature and trying to tease out his capacity for horrific acts. If Teddy is in truth a deranged man disconnected from reality, then why take this approach? Or was most of this conversation in his mind? We know some of the things he does and endures are real. He really does beat up a fellow patient; he blows up Dr. Cawley’s car; he assaults a guard. These things really happen. But he also has phantom conversations. We know the warden is real, but perhaps that conversation wasn’t. After all, a lengthy conversation with the “real” Rachel Solando (this time played by Patricia Clarkson) never actually took place because the person doesn’t exist. And he sees phantom versions of his deceased wife (Michelle Williams) again and again. Truth and fiction are tightly wound together because they are also wound together in his mind: the fire caused by his wife, the false story of an arsonist, the drowning, the imaginary patient, and on and on. It’s all layered together into a tangled knot, with every action, every memory, every conversation having several meanings. The use of multiple meanings cascades over the picture until even for the viewer true thoughts and fiction become a difficult-to-decipher blend. When Teddy confronts Dr. Cawley about the Shutter Island operation—experimenting with the human mind as part of a government operation, or so Teddy believes—Cawley responds indignantly, “I’ve built something valuable here, and valuable things have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix; they always have. I’m trying to do something people, yourself included, don’t understand, and I’m not going to give up without a fight.”
This response is perfectly in keeping with what Teddy is accusing the doctor of doing, but upon second and third viewing, it’s clear that Cawley is actually speaking about his attempts to treat Teddy and that his comments are intended for his fellow doctors, not Teddy himself. His work really is misunderstood, as the other doctors don’t believe in what he’s doing. He really is trying to avoid a quick fix (i.e., medication). This is all a grand experiment, one last chance at shaking Teddy from his delusions. And it works, at least momentarily. Once pushed beyond the limits of credulity, Teddy comes to his senses and realizes he’s actually Andrew Laeddis, a man whose wife murdered their children and a man who in turn killed her.
In the picture’s final moments, however, it appears that the effect was only temporary. Andrew again begins speaking to Dr. Sheehan as if he’s Teddy and the doctor is Chuck, hinting at the same conspiracy that had already consumed him. Dr. Sheehan is heartbroken at the relapse. But as with all in Shutter Island, things are not as they seem. Teddy drops a clue with his final words to Sheehan: “Which would be worse: To live as a monster or to die as a good man?” As soon as he asks the question and begins to walk away, Dr. Sheehan stands and calls for him, “Teddy?” But Andrew doesn’t respond to the name Teddy. He just walks on because in that moment he is Andrew, his real self. He gives one last look to Dr. Cawley. His eyes are clear. He is not seeing anything that isn’t there. This sudden regression was an act. He’s made a choice. He’s going to die as a good man rather than live as a monster: lobotomized, empty, a shell of who he was, but a good man, nonetheless.
In Scorsese pictures, escaping one’s past is a trick few can manage. The past is defined by past deeds, misdeeds, and ill-made decisions, and it hangs over Scorsese protagonists like a vulture. Even as far back as Who’s That Knocking at My Door? the Girl finds that a past for which she bears no blame still affects her life in a negative way. In a very Catholic way, the only way to purge these past sins, real or imagined, is through sacrifice. That’s how you absolve yourself. Paul Hackett is entombed as a statue (After Hours). Sam Bowden’s family is torn apart before he can move past his sins (Cape Fear). Henry Hill gives up having all his desires fulfilled just to cut ties from his past (GoodFellas). Paradoxically, Frank Pierce has to let someone die in order to lift his guilt (Bringing Out the Dead). And of course, the ultimate sacrifice is Jesus Christ’s in The Last Temptation of Christ, one made not for himself but for all of mankind. Teddy’s decision is not so broad and sweeping, but it comes from a similar place. “He was literally taking the weight of the cross, that character, the guilt that he had, what he did, what he experienced in his life,” Scorsese said. “That guilt was real, and that is interesting to me.”2
That Shutter Island gave the director an opportunity to explore a character’s debilitating guilt through the lens of classic film genres—noir, gothic horror, procedural thriller—was in some ways just a bonus. Few directors are as steeped in film history as Scorsese. He is a walking, talking list of obscure references to little-seen pictures. A chance to dabble with some of those techniques and to give nods to those older films, especially in a genre he doesn’t usually work in, is an appealing one.
But ultimately, for Scorsese it always comes down to character and theme. He may not typically make this kind of thriller, but if the theme is there, it becomes a Scorsese picture. Shutter Island is a picture steeped in Catholic imagery. It’s less overt here than in other pictures. There are no crosses, no crucifixes, no rosary beads, but the bloody search for redemption is. “The most important legacy of my Catholicism is guilt,” the director once said. “A major helping of guilt, like garlic.”3 Andrew Laeddis (a.k.a., US marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels) can probably say the same.
Despite Shutter Island being a picture seemingly well out of Scorsese’s wheelhouse, or at least what most people would consider his wheelhouse, it ended up being a major financial success, netting nearly $295 million worldwide on its $80 million budget. Only the Wolf of Wall Street would earn more money (not adjusted for inflation). It was a hit with international audiences. Critically it was more of a mixed bag, but genre pictures had never been his forte, no matter how well crafted. As good as pictures like The Color of Money and Cape Fear are, they don’t bleed Scorsese. He made them his, yes, but they aren’t representative of what he does best. His next film wouldn’t be, either, yet it would still manage to turn a shockingly unexpected genre from him—a family-friendly adventure—into a colorful, dynamic window into his soul.