Shutter Island - released 12/03/2010
Again, a film that came out a fair while ago but that I only watched yesterday. I bought this on Blu-Ray for my boyfriend for his birthday, which was in August. “How has it taken us two months to watch it?!” I hear you cry. Well, we knew it was going to be mentally challenging and would take a lot of focus to understand it, so it took us a while to find a time where we were mutually in the right frame of mind to tackle it. Was it worth the wait? Yes. Definitely.
It took us a little while to figure out when the film was set; our first guess was the ’70s, based on DiCaprio’s hideous tie (so glad I missed that decade), and it was only after the first war flashback that we realised it must be set in the ’50s. Not picking up on this straight away is probably cultural ignorance on our part, having not lived through the ’50s and despite three of our four collective parents being born in that decade, I don’t think either of us find it a particularly interesting period of time. As the film progressed, there were clues aside from the war flashbacks that placed it quite specifically within the ’50s; a lot of the talk of lobotomy as a treatment for insanity reminded me of something I once learnt about Tennessee Williams’ sister, Rose, and how she had a lobotomy as a “cure” for her supposed insanity and helped me to place the film quite specifically before I knew outright that it was set in 1954.
The inhibition of our ability to place this film within a time context could also be blamed on not being at all familiar with the story of Shutter Island. The novel from which the film is adapted has been sitting on my bookshelf for a rather long time, but I must confess that I haven’t even read the blurb and so didn’t have a clue what we were letting ourselves in for. And what a treat it was.
Initially I had some mixed feelings about Shutter Island. The premise for the plot was interesting; an investigation of the escape of a patient at an institute for the criminally insane, where none of the staff are remotely helpful and everything seems suspicious. But the progression, while gripping, seemed like a combination of sheer brilliance of imagination and a series of dreadfully convenient coincidences. Daniels’ lurid and horrific dreams wonderfully represent the ways in which the human mind can be tortured, but these, along with virtually everything else in the film, are reliant on the ending to become sensical rather than downright strange. Perhaps it is this reliance that makes the viewer persevere, hoping that eventually, everything will become clear to them. And when it DOES become clear, it’s in a way that I only came to suspect when it was right on top of me. Even when it did, I was reluctant to believe that it was ending that way. I was expecting for another twist, another turn, to tip everything on its head again, in anticipation of a happy ending that didn’t come. This wasn’t in any way dissatisfying though; in some ways it’s refreshing that not all films have a happy ending. It’s more like real life that way.
The attention to detail in this film was astonishing. At first I thought it was technical inaccuracy or us mis-seeing things, but when the plot climaxed, it all made sense and became clear as attention to detail that was intended to give us clues throughout. This is what I meant when I said that the entire film is dependant on the ending for clarification and for sense. An example of this would be the invisible water glass in the scene in which Daniels interviews patients who he thinks may have had something to do with their fellow inmate’s escape. It is only when everything becomes clear in the final few minutes of the film that you realise what this signified and it is immensely satisfying to realise that you picked up on a tiny detail, that others may have missed, and that has such disproportionate importance to the effect of the conclusion. It was quite fun, when reflecting on the film, to work out what the clues were and where they were placed.
Despite intensely enjoying the film in complete ignorance of the book, I couldn’t help but feel throughout that we were missing something that had been communicated in the book but omitted from the film. When it ended, I felt somewhat bewildered, though not cheated, and as though I should forsake all my uni work immediately and read the novel of Shutter Island instead to compare it to the film adaptation. It isn’t very often that a film makes me feel like this. Sadly though, academic sense has prevailed and I’ll be persevering with Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya instead of digging into Shutter Island, but it will definitely be the next piece of pleasure-reading I tackle. This film combined so many things so cleverly - the thriller, the discourse of mental illness and the barbarity of treatment thereof historically. As far as films go, to me this one was actually quite literary, and I loved it. It really made my brain work, and although brain-work isn’t perhaps a generally preferred pastime for a Friday night, I think the challenge actually increased my appreciation of it, and I hope the book evokes the same judgement.
