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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.

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