Scorsese finds himself on 'Shutter Island'

Let's be honest: Martin Scorsese has been playing it safe for the past decade. "Gangs of New York," "The Aviator" and "The Departed" are good-to-great films that exemplify Scorsese's mastery of visual storytelling, but you can feel the man pandering to mainstream audience tastes in a way that wasn't true of masterpieces like "Raging Bull" or "Taxi Driver," which remain shocking viewing experiences even today. Perhaps his Oscar for "The Departed" has set him free - "Shutter Island" is the weirdest film Scorsese's made since "Bringing Out the Dead" in 1999, and if it isn't entirely successful, it's exhilarating more often than not.

"Island" opens with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) traveling on a ferry to an insane asylum located on the titular island, where he has been summoned to search for a missing patient. As per genre requirements, nothing is at it seems: Teddy distrusts his new partner (Mark Ruffalo), the grandfatherly doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow) pontificate about psychotherapy as they impede his investigation, and one warden (Ted Levine) threatens to sink his teeth into Teddy's eyeball. Meanwhile, similarly-coiffed ladies (Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams) torment Teddy both inside and outside of his dreams.

"Shutter Island" is being billed as a picture with a "twist," but I think how secret the film's big surprise is intended to be is debatable - the general idea seems clear from the trailer, let alone the first hour of the film. If you're looking for a puzzle picture with a shocking solution, you're out of luck, which is why the film is at its worst when it's being excessively coy about what most of the audience has already guessed.

Fortunately, that doesn't happen all that often. Scorsese is far more interested in creating a film that initially seems like a dazzling mood piece and is later revealed to be something more complex. Though the film is never less than chilling, you can sense Scorsese's glee at taking on the horror genre for the first time in the care with which he films his set-pieces, sending his camera careening through baroque and vertiginous horror landscapes like the Escher-esque crisscrossing pathways of the ward for the most dangerous patients.

Scorsese cribs liberally from Samuel Fuller and Stanley Kubrick for most of the film, but Teddy's dream sequences are pure David Lynch - these candy-colored, surreal depictions show women crumbling into ashes, corpses reconstituting as women and Scorsese flaunting his ability to wring emotion out of acknowledged unreality.

Visual virtuosity aside, Scorsese also does fine work with his cast. Leonardo DiCaprio has never been a subtle actor (or one with a talent for the Boston accent the film requires), but he's got unhinged intensity, and it's fun to see him coil up tightly and then violently release. His buildup to a crescendo in an interrogation scene is also the best cinematic use of a pencil since "The Dark Knight." The rest of the cast is uniformly impressive, with particular credit going to Jackie Earle Haley, who, after this film and "Watchmen," has some kind of monopoly on raspy homicidal psychopaths.

There aren't too many long stretches in "Shutter Island" where some flicker of cinematic radiance doesn't impress you, but it may all seem like aimless grandstanding until the post-twist ending, which reveals the film to be far more ambitious than its pulpy plot might initially suggest. If most of the film seems like Scorsese's "The Shining," the ending reveals the powerful influence of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and adds a meta-layer to the film that practically demands a second viewing. It's also probably the most hauntingly sad ending that Scorsese has made since "Raging Bull," and it shows the film to be a surprisingly personal endeavor.

Scorsese has always made films to exorcise personal demons arising from his religion, heritage and personal life - he has said that kicking his cocaine addiction and making "Raging Bull," in particular, saved his life. For that reason, "Shutter Island" can be read as a direct expression of Scorsese's artistic philosophy, even with its goofy pulp origins. In a tremendously moving way, the film ultimately explains why one particular man creates art and why he will continue to do so even if it ends up killing him.