by Sunli Kim
Center Editor
     We define insanity as “a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns.” But we do not know how thin, how fragile that line between sanity and madness truly is; one small event, one tick, and what we establish as reality and fantasy can never be trusted. Martin Scorsese’s new film, Shutter Island, investigates how the mind has endless ways to both cripple and protect oneself in and from reality.

    The usage of film noir, a shadowy style popular in the 1940’s and 50’s that literally means “black film,” echoes throughout the mind-bending script, adapted from the Dennis Lehane novel of the same name. From the very beginning of the movie the grey, moody setting creates a solemn and eerie tone, offset by the protagonist’s rather ugly yet happily-colored tie, and his hauntingly theatrical and colorful dreams.

   Teddy Daniels is a US Marshall sent to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a patient in Asheville, a mental institution for the criminally insane. DiCaprio portrays this unforgettable character with great expression, grace, and rage; no longer is he the pretty-boy audiences remember from Titanic or Romeo and Juliet. After working with him in 1993’s This Boy’s Life, Robert DeNiro had personally relayed DiCaprio’s potential to Scorsese. And in following years, DiCaprio appeared in a number of Scorsese’s works, but could never quite reach that same golden artistry between Scorsese and DeNiro. “Shutter Island” just might be the film that allows him to do so.

    The case Daniels (DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are assigned seems deranged itself; the patient, a woman who allegedly drowned all three of her own children in a lake, disappeared from a locked room without shoes, on a rocky island in the midst of a hurricane. Cryptic messages, high-strung patients, enigmatic psychiatrists, and a fenced-off lighthouse add to Daniels’s paranoia that something is terribly wrong with the whole institution. But in addition to this case, Daniels is searching for someone more personal: the man who murdered his wife Dolores (Michelle Williams).

     The whole movie is gorgeously constructed; Teddy’s dreams and hallucinations remind me of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and his flashbacks to Dachau as a soldier will haunt the memory of the viewer. Scorsese’s artistry with the camera is displayed thoroughly. The music­–strident strings marking Teddy and Chuck’s arrival on the island, a heavy Mahler string and piano quartet, and the silence that accompanies the most intense sequences–enhances the tense atmosphere of the island. Blood and death have never been more carefully, beautifully, or lovingly portrayed. The liquid borders between insanity and truth is enough to make one doubt of his or her own sanity. Yet through the whole whirl of madness the resolution is extremely satisfying; whether for fun or for an extreme mind-exercise, Shutter Island is a perfect movie.