"Shutter Island" has movie goers in awe

If I told you I wasn’t crazy, would you believe me? Really? Who’s to say your version of reality is any more or any less real than my own? Who’s to say you’re not dreaming right now?  It all seems to make perfect sense while your cerebral cortex is trippin’ out on REMs, but you’ll wake up the next morning questioning what was, until just moments ago, legitimate reality comprised of absurd images, thoughts, sounds and their associated emotions.
Why are these existential questions being presented in a movie review? Get it together, man. Can’t you just tell me how well Martin Scorsese carries a storyline or about how much Leonardo DiCaprio’s career as an actor has matured since functioning to no other purpose than kicking hormonal 13-year-old libidos into gear?
A few things can be stated as fact. Number one: Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” is one of this season’s most anticipated and highly publicized films (as much thanks due to an all-star cast as the $20 million Paramount Pictures spent on commercial airtime during the Super Bowl). Number two: the film is a “psychological thriller,” a “mindf***” in every sense of the clichés. But what better way to combat an era of excruciating, mind-numbing predictability in screenwriting (ahem, “Avatar,” ahem) than allowing Scorsese creative freedom in directing a maniacal maze chock full of plot twists and moments that would leave Larry David in an inquisitive stare-off with the movie screen?     
Set mostly on a geologically and meteorologically treacherous looking island off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954, “Shutter Island” follows the story of two U.S. Marshalls sent to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a functionally secluded mental institution with one seriously scary prerequisite for admittance.
Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck (played by a well-supportive Mark Ruffalo) must resort to questioning the criminally insane and their sometimes comparably dubious ones in charge to make their case. Sensing the set up for a dark, scary couple of hours with plenty of opportunity to swing your right arm around that skittish young damsel whose ticket you shelled out $13 for?  Breathe easy Casanova. You chose the right movie.
Haunted by a violent past and plagued with a menu of attitude-altering demons equivalent in size to that of a Cheesecake Factory, Daniels is an unsound mind equipped with a badge thrust into a secretive and disturbing microcosm. It’s easy to question someone as emotionally vulnerable as Daniel’s capacity to rationalize a twisty-turny series of often mind-boggling events and plot twists, let alone make a definitive detective’s case out of them. DiCaprio plays out one of the most emotionally charged roles of his career with natural talent and well-tested experience, delving the audience directly into the unhinged mind of his character, as the Marshall learns more and more about the institution, its inhabitants and himself. Let me warn all you soccer moms tuned in to morning talk shows; the news isn’t always so bright and sunny on Shutter Island.
Our most hallowed of modern movie directors keeps the tone dark and ominous. Along with the graces reaped from the Scorsese touch come grounds for the idyllic thriller.  “Shutter Island” absorbs audiences with suspenseful yet all the while thought-provoking storyline and dialogue. From the moment our Bogart-ian detectives enter the island’s barbed wire fences, “Shutter Island” brings those cognitive enough to follow a script more sophisticated than an article in Cosmo on a bullet train into insanity and back (“Twilight” fans need not apply). It’s a “slasher” minus the slashing overdose plus a plot and character development structure worthy of an audience member’s full and undivided attention.
Some considerably disturbing imagery is coupled with an equally aggressive and unsettling orchestral soundtrack courtesy of long time Scorsese collaborator Robbie Robertson. Its supporting cast does their own part to keep things on the edge of figurative seats. 
Ben Kingsley, playing the role of the facility’s chief administrator, Dr. John Cawley, tacks on another worthy performance as a psychiatrist, although this time considerably less stoned and evidently more professional than his character in 2008’s coming of age piece of ‘90s nostalgia, “The Wackness.”  Any one of us not too proud to admit our vulnerabilities might agree that underneath all of their beaten-to-death jargon and bogus airs of compassion, a shrink could easily be equated to a pile of metaphoric horse dung.  Viewers are left constantly questioning the story’s ultimate base of reality; who to trust and on which side to place their sympathies.
So here’s my Ebert and Roeper two thumbs up, my RottenTomatoes.com “fresh tomato” icon, my Gene Shacklin whatever-the-hell-he-does.  Go see “Shutter Island” if you’re not too tied up getting the metaphoric mid-semester spiny pineapple inserted slowly into your hindquarters via USD’s professorial faculty.