Martin Scorsese’s latest potboiler bears the unmistakable markings of a classic film noir. Cigarette smoke hangs heavy in the air and tendrils about the characters, almost taking on a life of its own. Dream sequences become engulfed in flames and smoke. The camera lingers on one character taking a drag off of a cigarette and inhaling the smoke directly into his nostrils.
The smoke is so pervasive that I kept thinking there has to be a reason for it, beyond atmosphere. My conclusion is that the smoke is an allegorical symbol for “smoke and mirrors”, quite apropo because on Shutter Island, nothing is as it appears.
Leonardo DiCaprio (with a thick Boston accent) plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal who has been summoned to the mysterious Shutter Island, a foreboding chunk of land surrounded by rocky precipices. This makes the island ideal for housing dangerous and severely disturbed psychiatric patients. The movie takes place in 1954, when psychiatric patients were routinely given lobotomies, and other “treatments” were inflicted that are considered unethical and inhumane today.
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