Book vs. Movie
Shutter Island
By Russ Bickerstaff
March 1, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Shutter Island
Somewhere in the early part of last decade, young author Dennis Lehane decided to write something distinctly different from the Mystic River he had just finished. So he started working on a weird hybrid mystery thriller set in the 1950s. It was a piece of genre fiction that went on to become one of the best-selling novels of 2003. A critic from the New York Times called it "startlingly original." Producer Bradley Fisher was impressed with the novel and worked towards getting the film rights as soon as he could. He ended up getting Pathfinder screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis to write the film. She was interested in the project. Fisher figured he'd approach a dream director for the project, likely figuring that he would be promptly rejected and move on to a more realistic talent for the film. To his surprise, the legendary Martin Scorsese was not only interested in the project, he was also available. The resulting film opened as the number one film in the country and will likely make a fair amount of money, but how does the film by a legendary director measure-up to the work of the hot, young author that came before it?
The Book
Denis Lehane's Shutter Island fuses several different genres into a single work. Hard-boiled detective fiction meets a paranoid, cold war suspense thriller with late '60s sci-fi thrown in for good measure. In principal, it's a pretty good idea. And at its heart, Shutter Island seems to be peering into the nature of the human psyche. In light of its potential, it really is too bad that Shutter Island is an uninspired piece of hackwork.
The story follows an investigation into the mysterious disappearance of a patient at an island-based maximum-security mental institution midway through last century. A hardboiled detective finds himself delving into the complex mysteries of a place few outsiders have had the opportunity to venture into. Those unfamiliar with the history of psychology may find it a bit disturbing. Psychological horror slowly bleeds into the story, gradually overtaking the mystery elements of the narrative. Somewhere towards the end, the tale ends up briefly diving into late-‘60s Philip K. Dick territory - which brings up a really, really important aspect of the book that would be impossible to ignore in a comprehensive review. It does, however, prompt a spoiler alert. Consider yourself warned.
I knew going into the book that there was a plot twist at the end. And knowing that made the ending pretty predictable. The fact that the plot twist is so integral to an appreciation of the story puts it pretty solidly in the same neighborhood as the work of M. Night Shyamalan - give away the plot twist at the end and you've lost much of the appeal of getting to it. But since the book is largely an intolerable bore anyway, I have no problem mentioning that the man investigating the disappearance of the woman is actually a patient at the institution. The investigation is a radical attempt to treat his psychological issues without more invasive drugs or brain surgery. It's actually a pretty interesting idea.
Somewhere at the center of it all, Shutter Island reminds me of something a late professor of psychology mentioned in a lecture in the mid-‘90s. The professor in question mentioned the crossover in treatment of psychosis that came with the coming of psychotropic drugs. The treatment of mental patients prior to widespread use of drugs to treat them was draconian by contemporary standards. The late psychology professor asked a nurse at the dawn of psychopharmacology if the drugs really worked. In response, the nurse pointed to the curtains. "Before we started giving them the drugs," she said, "you couldn't keep those curtains on the walls. Now they stay up." The therapy that the protagonist in Shutter Island undergoes is an extremely dramatic representation of what happens when a therapist decides to let the curtains get torn down in the interest of treating the patient. In principle, this should be fun. The fact that it isn't says a lot about Lehane's lack of vision.
Rather than exploring the deeper issues posed by his premise, Lehane structures the book as a traditional, uninspired suspense thriller with a thoroughly uninspired prose style. The areas of the human psyche that are trudged through by the lush convolutions of Lehane's plot have already been explored pretty solidly in the work of other, far more accomplished mystery writers. There is far greater emotional depth to the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which is off considering they neither of them spent extensive time with a protagonist crawling around in a mental institution. With all the elements he had brought together, Lehane had the opportunity to tell an engrossing suspense story with a profound amount of depth. Without that depth, the novel falls apart under the weight of its convolutions once the plot approaches its final resolution.
The Movie
The biggest success of the film is reversing the Shyamalanian nature of the novel without significantly changing the plot. One can safely go into the film knowing that Leonardo DiCaprio is playing a man who is undergoing a radical form of therapy without that knowledge causing the film to lose any of its dramatic impact. Some if this has to do with the nature of the dramatic medium of cinema. Some of it has to do with really compelling performances by some really, really talented actors. I like to think that at least some of it has something to do with the overwhelming storytelling talent of legendary film director Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese loved the idea of working on a psychological horror piece. Here he approaches the cinematic language of horror with his own distinct accent that has been honed on some of the most interesting dramas of the let 20th century. There's a freshness there. Even as you're seeing those same old, spooky corridors of a mental institution and some of that same insanity that has populated horror films since the dawn of cinema, there's a very distinct and distinctly new feeling that Scorsese brings to the screen and it goes a long way towards making this an entertaining film in spire of its source material.
The performances of the actors in Shutter Island make the film a great deal of fun to watch even with a full knowledge of how the whole thing is going to end. There's a subtlety to every performance here that doesn't make it into the prose of the original novel and makes the film quite a bit more fascinating. DiCaprio does a pretty good job of making the detective in question likeable enough. The passions and concerns of the patient are delicately rendered by DiCaprio. He's interesting to watch here, but it's even more interesting to watch there rest of the cast react to him.
Many of the rest of the characters are aware that DiCaprio is undergoing a complex form of treatment and the actors playing them do a brilliant job of casting just the right shadows over the edges of their performances that let you know that their characters know that there's something more going on here. Mark Ruffalo plays the detective's assistant with admirable precision. He's trying to help out the detective on a couple of different levels here and they're all pretty subtle. Ben Kingsley plays the psychologist at the facility who is administering the treatment. Kingsley manages to seem both a bit sinister and a bit compassionate as the plot runs its convolutions. There are a number of other really fascinating performances here as the treatment runs its course. Different people react in different ways to the idea of treating a potentially dangerous patient like a perfectly sane outside agent with enough authority over them to conduct an investigation into a disappearance that hasn't happened. Max von Sydow manages a level of both sympathy and disgust as a German doctor at the facility. Ted Levine makes a cheesy little monologue by the warden come across brilliantly as a warden escorting the detective back to civilization after he was found wandering around in a hurricane.
Scorsese and DP Robert Richardson give the film a depth and visual poetry that was never present in Lehane's relatively flat prose style. The production used an actual abandoned asylum from the era to stand-in for the island-based institution. The entire place was refurbished to look like a fully operating institution based on the designs of an architect of such structures from the era. Scorsese and company consulted an actual doctor who had worked on changing the old state-run mental institutions into more humane, modern facilities in the 1960s. The film is fantastic psychological horror, but there's a level of commitment to detail that gives the film a kind of integrity that it's difficult to feel from Lehane's original novel.
The Verdict
While Lehane's original novel had presented an interesting premise that was competently executed as pop fiction, the novel Shutter Island fails to deliver on any of the potential for greater depth that the premise poses. Filled with a kind of rich detail and subtlety not found in the uninspired prose of Lehane's novel, Scorsese's film has a kind of depth to it that is much more compelling. Complex depictions of characters by a very talented cast begin to delve into some of the avenues of the human psyche that Lehane so carelessly overlooked in the novel. In being reasonably faithful to the novel's plot, the film is unable to make-up for its shortcomings, but it comes a lot closer to realizing the potential of what is truly a very interesting premise.